Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Culling your existing poems
The seamless book of poetry
Long-form genres
In this chapter
· Commonalities in poetry
· Shared images and metaphors
· Identifying density and intensity
· Similarities in prosody, rhythm, and rhyme
To start this chapter, let’s assume you’ve written a number of poems, sent them out to poetry journals, read them in public, and even had some of them published. Now it’s time to assemble those poems a book manuscript—along with some new ones you might feel necessary to complete your collection—you can submit to publishers or publication contests.
Because most of your poems are already written, you might think you just need to patch them together to form your book and fill in with new ones as necessary. Wrong. The process of publishing a poetry collection is difficult and time-consuming.
Culling your existing poems
Begin by assembling all the poems you want to consider putting into your book, printing one poem per page (unless of course, the poem is longer than a single page) if they’re on your computer, or consider photocopying them one per page if they’re in your journal. Getting them all out in front of you like this helps you see what you have. And it’s a chance for you to make any small revisions you want to make to individual poems so you can then concentrate on the shape of the book as a whole.
Next, decide what size book of poems you want to create. A typical chapbook (a small book of poetry) is 20 to 30 pages, while a full-length collection runs about 50 or more pages. You might well change your mind about the length when you’re actually selecting and ordering your poems, which is fine.
With the length of your book in mind, sift through all your printed or copied poems, and put them into piles you feel belong together in some way—a series of poems on related themes, or a group of poems written using a particular form, or a chronological sequence of poems written in the voice of a single character.
Let your piles sit at least overnight without thinking about them. Then come back to them, pick up each pile, and read through the poems, trying to see them as a reader and not as their author. If you know your poems well and find your eyes skipping ahead, read them out loud to yourself to be sure you take the time to really listen to them.
After you’ve read through a stack of poems, pull out any that no longer seem to fit in that particular pile, and put the poems you want to keep together in the order you want your readers to experience them. You might find yourself doing lots of reshuffling over time, moving poems from one stack into another, melding whole groups of poems together by combining stacks, or discovering new groupings that need to be separate and on their own. That’s part of the process. You’ll likely come across new ideas for books or chapbooks and also change your mind about decisions you’ve made earlier in the process a number of times before the poems settle into the shape of a book or chapbook.
IDEAS AND INSPIRATION
After you’ve pared down and reordered each pile of poems, let them sit again at least overnight. You can use this time to mull over your reading, listening for the poems that stand out in each stack and how they sound together. Pay attention to other poems that might have come to mind when you were reading a certain stack. Should you add them to the stack, or replace similar poems you’ve already chosen with the ones that now come to mind?
Think again about the length of book you want to create. You might decide that one stack of related poems would make a good short chapbook. Or you might have a really large pile of poems that would all go together into a long collection. Or you might want to combine several of your piles as sections within a full-length book.
If you feel you’re endlessly sifting and shuffling among the piles and the poems aren’t settling into the shape of a book, try actually making them into a book you can live with and then leaf through it. Make multiple copies of the poems and staple or tape them together, punch holes in the pages and put them into a three-ring notebook, or use your computer to print them out in book format (most word processing programs will do this fairly easily). Don’t think too much about typography or design; at this point, you simply want to put the poems in order with facing left and right pages so you can read through the book and see how they interact in that order.
After you’ve decided on the length and general shape of your book manuscript, choose a title for your book. A title might have suggested itself during your sifting and ordering of the poems, or you might want to read through them again to find one—perhaps the title of a central poem, or a phrase taken from one of the poems, or something completely different.
After you’ve put together your manuscript, carefully proofread it from beginning to end. If you’ve spent a lot of time with the book already, you might be tempted to give it only a cursory read-through. I caution you against this, but if this is the route you take, first set it aside for a few days or weeks so that when you come back to it, you can pay close attention to each poem, each title, each line, each punctuation mark. You’ll likely find yourself making additional revisions to the poems at this point. Don’t hold back because this final reading might be the last chance you have to make changes before you send the book out into the world.
IDEAS AND INSPIRATION
Proofreading your own work is difficult, so feel free to ask a friend, or two, to proofread the manuscript for you. Then go through all their notes carefully. Fresh eyes will likely spot some errors that slid right by you, but don’t feel that you must accept every editorial change they suggest. When in doubt about punctuation or line breaks, read the poem aloud and see how it sounds.
Now it’s time to take a closer look at the main elements that will help you assemble your book, including identifying commonalities in verse; common images and metaphors; tracing density and intensity; and creating commonalities in prosody, rhythm, and rhyme.