So, with The Crossover, maybe there are four, five, or six or seven different forms of poetry, and I knew going in that I wanted to do different forms of poetry. And so the subject matter of each poem, I found that it lent itself to a certain type of poem. For instance, in the story Josh, the main character’s mother, sent some text messages.
I thought well, text messages are — they’re really short. I mean what are they, 160 characters before it goes onto the one of two and two of two before it continues? And so I thought well, how cool would it be for text messages to be a short form of verse, maybe a haiku. I thought it lent itself to that form.
There are some poems in the book where there are conversations between brothers or conversations between parent and child. And conversations are I say something, you say something, I say something, you say something. I say something a little bit longer, you listen, you say something. I thought how cool would it be for those poems to be in couplets or tercets, which are two-line stanzas or three-line stanzas to really show it.
I was really trying to make sure that the poems on the page visually looked like I wanted them to sound and like they would be heard. And so there were some poems where the main character is sort of trash talking or bragging, which was something I used to do on the tennis court. I wasn’t very good in my first two years of playing tennis in high school, but I was tall and I had — I wore corduroy shorts and I wore a yellow tank top and red high-top Chuck Taylors and so I had this visual look and I talked trash.
And I won. I won a lot of my games by getting inside their heads. And I thought when writing The Crossover, how cool would it be to have this trash talker and for us to see his trash talking on the page and so I made the words do different things in those poems. And some of the words are diagonal and some of the, you know, some of the words are — they get bigger. And so I think the subject matter of each poem dictated the form of poetry that I would use and I hope it worked.
