Duke Ellington once said that it’s good to have limits. He was talking about jazz music, but I think the same can be said about writing. When I write poetry I often use some sort of constraining form—sometimes a traditional form, like the sonnet, sometimes one of my own devising—to help compress and intensify the material and also the medium, language. That’s what the limitations of form are for. Not to provide a stage on which a writer gets to preen and flaunt mastery of the craft; not to promote retrograde cultural nostalgia or politically reactionary attitudes. Simply, formal constraints impose a framework that forces the imagination to dig deeper, making the writer compress and intensify the material of the poem—or, sometimes, the novel.

The framework of historical fact I used in writing Afterlands was particularly suited to imposing constraints, and not only formally but geographically. In 1871 the U.S. Navy sent a largely civilian expedition north to the Arctic where it was to reach the North Pole, if possible, and plant the American flag. But the ship, the USS Polaris, was stopped by the ice, and after a full winter trapped in the ice it was forced to turn back. It didn’t get far. During a storm in which the ship seemed to be sinking, much of the crew—a white American, a black American, five Germans, a Dane, a Swede, an Englishman, and two Inuit families—were cast away on a large ice-floe, which then began to shrink steadily as it drifted south in the Arctic seas through the winter darkness. This microcosm of varied characters soon fragmented along ethnic and national lines, even as the floe’s steady shrinking forced them into ever closer quarters.

There are two sides to the Vogue editor and New York icon André Leon Talley.

When Naomi Campbell, Donald Trump and Vera Wang joined him at the New York Historical Society benefit the other night, I expected a breathtaking presence to stand before us. Often caught on camera in flamboyant fashions, Talley delivered a surprisingly subtle look, with black on black simplicity. The only hint of color peeked from his pocket in the form of a cranberry silk handkerchief.

Co-chairing the event were Pat Aschul and the pregnant Melania Trump, in a cleavage-baring, gorgeous black gown, who stopped by with her husband en route to the premiere of “King Kong.” Unlike Melania, Talley looked like he wanted to blend in—but his height didn’t let him. Talley is too tall for anonymity, and too graceful to slouch.