Poetry and Process Redux: (Some) Rules for Writing... a Book of Poems

In my last post, I cited some "rules" I find interesting and helpful in the writing of poems, all of which are good to keep creative juices brimming, muses engaged, and words flowing. These are primarily tips for producing individual poems, for staying in the zone and wanting to create, and if you're pursuing and trying to capitalize on moments of inspiration, this is good enough. But if you're looking to produce something larger than an individual poem, the rules only get you as far as raw material. There are more and different rules when you're writing a book.

Or so it seems to me. When I was compiling my chapbook To The Ones Who Must Be Loved, I was arranging poems that, though organized around a consistent thematic element, were all written as individuals. In the first draft of the manuscript, three problems emerged almost immediately:

• Sameness in look on the page
• too-frequent use of faborite words
• repeated presentation of particular images

A number of the poems in To The Ones appeared in journals before joining others in the book, but never more than two at a time, so these issues didn't present themselves before the completed manuscript. Since all the poems are in a voice very close to my own, they obviously reflected my speech habits, which isn't a handicap until you're 12 pages into a 24 page book and are not interested in the next poem because the last three have somehow blended together. I was fortunate to have great feedback from poet friends to point these things out to me and to suggest ways to work through them, but it was clear that a no time in their writing was I thinking about "the book", even though I was writing poems for "the book" for years. That's a mistake I'm trying to make with my current project.

Again here, I had a few poems before I had the idea for the book, but this time I started thinking about 6 poems in about what the final project should look like, and to apply some tools to refine the collection as it develops rather than discover its shortcomings later. To that end, I had do develop  some rules and be firm about applying them.

First, I created an outline. Is that common for poetry collections? It didn't seem obvious to me, but there was a particular story arc I wanted to present and a list of images and incidents I wanted to make sure were included; this made outlining essential - and had the effect of ejecting some individual poems if they tread on space charted out elsewhere in the collection. After the 50% complete point, it seemed that for every two poems I added, I had to remove one to avoid the "repeated used of particular images" trap. Might be a little frustrating that the last pages of the collection are coming together so slowly, but I'm so much more confident in the final product - it's worth it.

Next, I had to set boundaries on voice. One big difference in the new collection is that I'm speaking in the voice of a historical figure, which made it easy to avoid my own cadence in language, but harder to achieve consistency without repetition of "favorite words". I tried to fill my head with this figure's writings - through translation, since he didn't write in English - so I could make intelligent word choices. There are some words that I've avoided religiously and some I've deliberately seeded throughout the book, but consciously, considering spacing in the book, link to the repeating themes. It may come across the same way to a reader, but it will be the result of something I'm actively trying, and therefore will have a better (and earlier) idea how to change.

The outline puts me in much better position to anticipate the page-sameness issue. Instead of following inspiration to create a poem and trying to find a place for it in the sequence later, I'm writing specifically to fill a need in the story arc or character development, which means I have an idea of the context for the poem long before it is complete. While this doesn't mean I don't reorder later (not by a long shot), it does direct me to consider choices on for, rhyme, length, etc. from outside the poem, anticipating and avoiding "sameness... on the page."

Now my collection is a narrative with a distinct story arc, and there are good models to follow (such as the novels in verse of Meg Kearney), but the outlining technique is adaptable to other forms as well if you can have a model for the final product in mind (like BJ Ward's Seventeen Love Poems with No Despair, a riff on Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair).

So here are are my rules for writing a book of poems (as opposed to collecting a book out of previously-written poems):

1. Explore the subject - write a few individual poems to see if the concept holds up in quantity and quality of ideas well enough to support a book,
2. Design the final manuscript - for a narrative, outline the story from beginning to end. For other kinds of collections, define the "takeaway" of the book - either a model you'll follow or an impression you're trying to create.
3. Write the last poem - this establishes the point you're working toward. You can change it later, but you can't program the GPS without a starting destination.
4. Write regularly, targeting specific places in the manuscript when you're writing. Be aware of the poems you've already placed in these sections.
5. Weed regularly, look for unintended repetition and especially for important elements of your outline that are less powerfully included than you like.
6. Repeat 4-5 until you are satisfied with the draft

This launches us into the gathering and use of feedback, a task for another day.

Are these rules any good? I don't know, I'm completing my second manuscript right now, and this is how I approached it. We'll find out next year if it worked.

Up next: There's no place like poem for the holidays.