Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Identifying commonalities in verse
The seamless book of poetry
Long-form genres

A fundamental challenge in writing a book of poetry is figuring out how to organize it, whether you arrange it by theme, motif, etc.—in a phrase, identifying commonalities in verse.

For example, readers of my first collection in draft form pointed out the often visceral quality of my poems. As many as half of them dealt with a literal death, and a third of the remaining contained some sort of violence (emotional, physical, psychological, etc.). Although I was already aware of this fact, it was nice to have it confirmed by others.

There are countless ways to organize a draft of poems or any other type of work. The fact that I’ve done it in other book genres—novel, memoir, biography, scholarly, textbook, anthology—makes the identification of themes out of hundreds of pages less difficult for me than for a beginning writer. A great deal of the work is intuitive, determining location, harmonies, and pieces that ring or build on each other. The important overall thing for a poetry collection is getting the poems to build off each other in such a way that it drives at something bigger.

One thing to keep in mind is that just because something got published doesn’t mean it definitively has more worth than something that appeared in a lesser venue or met with repeated rejection. Things that have nothing to do with your poems can figure into that, such as a given journal’s politics/focus and the familiarity of your name—or lack thereof—to the editor. In fact, these elements are so pervasive in the poetry world, I have chosen to publish all my poems under pseudonyms. In addition, tastes constantly change, so trust your instincts. If a poem feels weak to you, leave it out.

Be sure the poems that begin your collection establish the voice and strength of your manuscript. Even those you feel best about should undergo revision, and the very first poems in the book should introduce the issues, images, and sources of conflict or tension that will be revisited throughout.

Because many of my own poems deal with nature, science, and humanism as they affect one being, more than one reader of my manuscript supported the title “Entity.” While playing with the order, I put one of my poems in which a child is injected with experimental proteins, followed by a sex poem in which the sex is great but the woman nonetheless feels it’s not quite natural in some way. These two poems capture the book’s themes while also offering a hint that the male sexual participant is, in fact, the medically victimized boy. Although I did not retain this beginning, at the time I thought it quite promising.

When you have a promising order, think about dividing the book into separate sections. Dividing your work further forces you to not only make the poems interact at a more personal level, but also makes you see how they might be revised to inform the greater trajectory of the work.

As it happened, my own collection settled on subsection organized by theme: the humanism of one character, followed by science, nature, and then a return to humanism, albeit in the form of another character.

WRITING PROMPT

Establish a tentative organization for your collection of poems.

If you think you need to write a few more poems to round out your collection, that’s okay. The following sections offer some further advice, beyond what was presented in Chapter 13, that can help you create new poems to fill the caps in your current body of work.