A book on poetry writing I’ve been revisiting lately is Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, edited by Susan Grimm. In the introduction of the book, Susan Grimm says “being able to perceive a rationale is key.” Our human brains are trained to recognize patterns, and we can often find a reason for the order of things. However, if a beta reader is puzzled by the order of your poems or sees another possible arc, that can be helpful feedback.
In another essay in the book, Robert Miltner asks “what are the impulses—the topic, concepts, obsessions—around which the poems in the body of work will gather?” I recently took an ekphrastic approach to finding themes in a friend’s manuscript-in-progress, by assigning icons (I simply used Microsoft Office’s searchable suite of icons) to each theme I recognized and stamping the poem with one to three icons that seemed central to the meaning of it. This helped us sort through the poems in different possible ways, and to discuss how the themes work together and speak to one another. I could have simply picked words like “admiration” or “motherhood” to represent the themes, but the act of translating each theme I recognized into a visual representation was a creative act that spurred ideas about the work itself. A few odes to fellow writers end up being stamped with a shooting star. And the concept of mother visually usually involves an other, the child next to the mother, while the childhood icon itself was a small stick figure holding a balloon.
There are other ideas I can think of, too, to help delineate themes or topics—I’m reminded of a lecture given by the neurologist Oliver Sacks many years ago where he spoke of his own writing processes. He said that sometimes he wrote passages in different colored pens, allowing each color to represent a different perspective or point. “Sometimes the red speaks to the green, and the purple judicates,” he said.
In the second essay of the book, Bonnie Jacobson says “I think that’s what arranging a book of poems comes down to: creating a mega-poem that in some way comments on all the others, or at least takes the poet and the reader a distance from where both began.” Sometimes there is a poem you’ve already written that is well-suited to being first or last, that sums up the book in an exponential way. And some poets are better at writing a mega-poem after they’ve finished the rest of the book, after reviewing and contemplating their collection.
I’ll let you all read the book for more insights, but I’d also like to announce that I’m open to working with poets who have a chapbook or full-length book of poetry ready for review. Contact me with a few details about your book-in-progress if you’d like to work with me to polish your book for publication, and I’ll share my editing service details, schedule, and rates.
