Poet Sandra Marchetti - From 'Aisle 228' to 'Diorama'

In her third book of poetry, Diorama, poet Sandra Marchetti presents a collection of over 50 poems that she completed throughout a ten-year period. Her previous collection, Aisle 228, which was centered around baseball, won the 2023 Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry of the Year. This time around, Marchetti’s poems are heavily influenced by the works of poets she loves and admires. As she describes it, “There are themes and there are links [to her previous collections], but it’s not something I can sum up in a sentence. I will tell you the title holds sort of a key. Actually, the cover of the book is a photograph of one of the Thorne miniature rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, which is a diorama… it takes a different skill set to build a diorama than it does to build whatever real life thing its modeled after, and to go back to the themes of the book… the idea with the book for me was, can I write some poems about my influences or using lines and titles and poems of my influences, other poets I love, can I use them to create my own poems? …for me I really wanted to see if I could write my own poems but incorporate my influences in one way or another… I’m thinking of my book as the diorama, right? It took a different skillset to write it, but it’s also harkening back to these other influences, these other people, and so that’s a huge theme in this book.”

While some may find poetry challenging to understand as compared to other works of literature, Marchetti assures readers that poems can be interpreted however they’d like. “The thing about poetry that’s great for the age we live in is it’s easy to read, it takes but a minute of your time, and I always stress to people… you don’t have to get a certain meaning from it. Whatever you’re able to glean, whatever stands out to you… that’s enough, you know? That is more than enough… I do think that when we’re writing, part of the delight of the process is that we surprise ourselves. There are things there that we didn’t expect to be there… I really think most poets would tell you, like, whatever you’re getting out of it is just fine… especially readers of poetry, they want to make their own meanings, they want there to be a little bit of mystery. If you’re hitting the nail on the head and hammering it home, it’s probably too much…”