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On Tree Forts and Poetry, Structure and Support

Earlier this summer when I was planning my MFA class on the relationship between form and content in poetry, somehow in the process of deciding what and how to approach this course I got to thinking about tree forts. Growing up near woods and with plenty of free time on my hands, I built a lot of tree forts when I was a kid. Sadly I don’t think that’s much of a thing anymore, but that’s a subject for another essay.

Anyway. Obviously my friends and I had no formal building or architectural training, yet we managed to build some large and complex forts high in the trees. It helped a bit that a friend’s father worked at a lumber yard, so we had access to lots of scrap wood. One of our forts included three stories, was more-or-less waterproofed, heated, and looked like something Frank Loyd Wright would design if he was a 13 year old making tree forts.

Somehow we had this gift, probably luck, for finding the right trees for the job. In our style of tree fort, you needed three or four trees. They were the main structural supports. They had to be close enough together that our frame boards could reach, reasonably straight and not too rotten. For our largest and most well-built tree fort we used four trees growing out of a hill so one side was closer to the ground than the other, which made it easier to build a ramp to get to it. I think about those support trees when thinking about poems. Their position determined a lot—the shape and size of the rooms especially—and I’ve asked myself what the equivalent would be in a poem. It varies of course, but having some secure starting place to hang your first board, or your first line, and build on that, can be the difference between a fort that leaks and gets overrun by raccoons and one that you can spend the night in without fearing collapse.

“You use what you have, you learn to work the structure to create what you need.” writes Julia Alvarez about writing sonnets in her essay Housekeeping Cages. This was our approach, my friends and I. We had plenty of woods with tall trees. We had access to limited building materials (from our parents or stolen from construction sites) and we had time on our hands. Our materials gave us a start, even gave us the ideas to work with, but they didn’t limit us. We took risks (like building a hibachi and old tin pipe into a fireplace 40 feet off the ground), and got creative (we sealed cracks with melted candle wax, which of course melted away in the summer.)

We also had a reasonable arsenal of tools for the job. Hammers and saws mostly, buckets of nails, because we were crude builders making up the rules as we went along. “One has to know the tools, so he doesn’t work against himself. Tools make the job easier.” writes Yusef Komunyakaa about a period in the ’80s when he discovered the voice and form for some of his poems. Our forts would probably have gone higher, lasted longer and looked less like trash heaps with better tools.

I try to impress upon newer writers the importance of acquiring as many tools as possible, of studying structures and approaches that have worked in the past, so they can use them, adapt them, expand on them for their own poems. And I continue to try to acquire new tools myself.  I’ll never build a tree fort again, but I remember the feeling of searching around our heap of crap wood looking for the perfect beam, the right plank of plywood, and the satisfaction of seeing how well it fit.

Here’s one of my tree fort poems, published by Foliate Oak.

By the way, we always called them forts, not houses. Maybe that’s a regional thing, or just a neighborhood thing, or maybe we thought we were defending something with these structures. That’s probably for a later poem.

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All Poems are Triangles

Form in poetry is more than just meter, stanza, and line break. It’s also a way of thinking. It’s the direction, pace and energy of the poem, and one of the main ways a writer can direct the reader’s experience. And, at least in my way of understanding, it’s also not something that’s simply visible on the page or scannable across a line. Shape and structure is metaphysical as much as it’s physical.

And this all is a way into my idea that all poems are triangles. Poems are kinds of vessels of energy. You cram a bunch of things in one end (images, concepts, sounds, ideas) and something else emerges from the other. Like a triangle, poems have a wide end and a narrow end. From a content point of view, a poem can start with a small point (a particular image, moment, or idea) and then expand, the way an ant hill expands as it gets to the base. Or the poem can start out large, with a wide idea that that covers everything, then narrows to make a particularly sharp point at the end. Think of that as a large funnel you dump the poem into, and it comes out a small opening at the bottom.

The most typical, at least in my experience (and in my own writing) is the poem/triangle that starts small and gets wider as it develops. Remember, I’m talking about the idea structure, not the line length or any other kind of structure. Often you’ll see a poem use some small moment or image as a trigger, which leads to another, and another, and as the images build, so does the idea and consequence of the poem. Take this William Stafford poem as an example:

At the Bomb Testing Site

By William E. Stafford

At noon in the desert a panting lizard

waited for history, its elbows tense,

watching the curve of a particular road

as if something might happen.

It was looking at something farther off

than people could see, an important scene

acted in stone for little selves

at the flute end of consequences.

There was just a continent without much on it

under a sky that never cared less.

Ready for a change, the elbows waited.

The hands gripped hard on the desert.

It starts with the lizard just sitting on a road panting, but almost immediately the poem starts to expand (“waited for history”) until at the end the poem seems to encompass the whole future in it.

This Jane Hirshfield poem does a very similar thing. It begin with on a small point, the young tree, and ends wide with “immensity taps at your life.”

Tree

By Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish

to let a young redwood

grow next to a house.

Even in this

one lifetime,

you will have to choose.

That great calm being,

this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.

Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

This poem by Natasha Trethewey, does the opposite. It starts with a large idea, almost the way an essay may start with a thesis statement, and then the poem progresses with details to support or explain the first idea, finally landing on a point, like a gymnast beginning with a large opening move then landing solidly on small, steady feet.

Theories of Time and Space

by Natasha Trethewey

You can get there from here, though

there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere

you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-

by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this

to its natural conclusion—dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where

riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over

the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried

terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry—tome of memory,

its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,

someone will take your picture:

the photograph—who you were—

will be waiting when you return.

Note that the wide parts of a poem tend to be statements or metaphors, while the narrow parts tend to be images. Metaphors, especially similes, are expansion devices. Look at what a simile does—it takes one thing, compares it to something else, and creates a third space.

First, of course this silly idea about triangles doesn’t always work. Some poems are straight columns. Some are so gerrymandered that you can’t even name their shape. So how do I use this concept anyway?

Thinking of the shape of a poem’s idea helps me visualize how its energy and pace work, how it tightens and speeds up, or comes to a pause. In composition this can help me overcome roadblocks. If a poem seems to be stalled at some point, not moving the way I want, I’ll overlay the triangle to it and test which direction the poem is pointing, what kind of base or point is has, and where the break in its energy is. This can sometimes help me solve problems I otherwise couldn’t see. Sometimes when I’m stuck on a poem but can’t seem to see the shape, I’ll try to carve a triangle out of it—the way a sculptor sees a shape inside a block of stone.

It also helps me when reading poems, especially when I want to analyze how a poem works. I’ll look at the opening and closing to figure out which is the wide end and which is the narrow end. Is the narrow end a landing or the tip of a funnel. Does the wide base allow the idea to keep growing beyond the poem?

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Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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Not Taking for Granted: Notes on Why Poetry

Yesterday at the Philadelphia Stories LitLife poetry festival, held at Rosemont College, where I teach occasional workshops, I heard the keynote poet M. Nzadi Keita make two statements that helped me verbalize a few things that have always been on my mind, and probably on the minds of most poets—why write poetry?

First, she said (paraphrasing Lucille Clifton, Keita explained) that poets exist to not take the world for granted. I would stretch that a little to say that poets write so as to not take their life for granted. In my non-poetry life I’m also a writer. I’ve been an editor and writer for magazines and website for more than 20 years, mostly covering technology and electronics. Once at a tech conference a person who’d heard about my poetry asked why I did that since it makes so little money. I replied with something about how I didn’t want my writing legacy to be product reviews and articles on how to program a security system. That I wanted to investigate things of more importance. Of course that shut down the conversation and we went on to look at whatever new gadget the person was trying to talk me into writing about.

litlife_people

Three people who don’t take life for granted: poet M. Nzadi Keita, poet and publisher Larry Robin, poet and editor Courtney Bambrick at the Philadelphia Stories LitLife festival.

Everything is bigger than it is, everything is more important than you think it is, or can be, and poetry is the best way to investigate that. To take something for granted is to fail to fully appreciate a thing in its wholeness, to fail to look beyond its surface texture, its first layer of function. Poetry does the opposite of that. Poetry looks at the life beyond the life of a thing or a story or a moment. It finds the metaphor in the most mundane of things—think of Pablo Neruda’s odes or Gary Snyder’s meditations on nature, or basically any poet writing about anything.

Poets don’t assume a thing is just a thing—they look beyond the obvious truths for the truths that require more digging. And that comes to the second thing Keita said that I wrote down in my notebook: “the impulse to research changes everything.” I underlined that three times, because that is such a powerful truth about poetry, writing poetry, and the urge to create. Creating isn’t so much about making something new as it is finding new ways to experience the old (or the things that already exist). Keita went on to talk about the world as multiple words, and the need to acknowledge and sort through the many layers of it. This, she said, is a de-centering experience, and poets thrive on that de-centering.

Yes, the searching does change everything. Not just in poetry, but in everything in life, but especially poetry. Or perhaps, poets have found the research method which best suits them. Other artists have their own ways of course. Words, images, metaphors, especially metaphors, are ways poets research the world, find the layers, de-center, not take life for granted. Each time we search for a new way to say love, or a new way to describe a familiar scene, or a simile to expand an experience, we’re looking at another layer and appreciating its newness, its complexity.

And, to circle back—that’s a large part of why I write poetry, and why it matters to me. Poets aren’t satisfied with simple answers. They’re not satisfied with the surface or the first impression. They do the work of peeling back the layers, looking at the world from different angles, not taking for granted.

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The Poem is the Question

I’ve got a lot of weird theories about poems, and mostly they’re just ways to help me think about poetry or help me work through poetry problems (such as my theory that all poems are triangles). One of these theories is that a question is an essential element in every poem. That doesn’t mean that every poem needs a sentence that ends in a question mark, or that the question or answer is even clear–it’s just there, doing it’s thing in the same way we don’t really notice our circulatory system unless something’s gone wrong.

As many teaches have repeated in many classrooms, there are no wrong questions, just wrong answers. (Maybe it was there are no wrong sandwiches, just wrong condiments.) When we’re talking about poetry, or about the making of it in particular, again there are no wrong questions, but there may also be no wrong answers. The question, however, is crucial the poem’s very existence. It’s the heart of each poem.

Here’s how it works. After I’ve gotten the bones of a poem down, maybe established the situation or narrative, the shape and the rhythm, but I’m failing to find a way to bring it all together, I go back to the idea of the question. I’ll scrounge around in the poem to try to find what it’s asking. If I figure out the question or the motivation in the poem, then I’m better equipped to solve its problems. My attempt to answer the question can sometimes help me through the poem’s speed bumps or can help me navigate safely through the poem’s turn. Sometimes it helps to actually put a question in the poem–either as a crutch that you’ll eventually remove–or as a permanent part of the poem. A question is a pretty interesting part of speech in that it’s one of the few that almost always demands a response from the reader. If you ask the reader a question, they feel compelled to answer–or look for the answer.

If you’re the type of writer who likes prompts, question can be great for jump-starting a poem. You can questions anywhere, about anything, and use them as starting points. I’ve recently been reading Ace Boggess wonderful book  I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, which is an entire collection of question poems. Some are questions he’s been asked by other people. Some he heard in songs, overheard in public or found in other ways.

Thinking in terms of questions can also help with organizing a manuscript of poems. When putting together a collection I’ve asked myself what question the poems, as a whole, are attempting to answer. They could be big questions: what’s the meaning of my existence? how do I live this way? why are dogs better than cats?  Or they could be more specific or personal questions: how do I deal with this loss? how do I reconcile my past mistakes? why is my dog better than your dog? The poems in the collection may then be organized so that they raise the issue, present the evidence and then seek to answer. Of course, since we’re talking about poetry, the way they answer the question may not exactly seem like an answer, and may raise more questions… but that allows you to write more poems. (I have more thoughts on organizing a book here.)

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind this afternoon. Feel free to post any questions below.

Here are some great question poems I like:

Three by Ace Boggess

Some Questions You Might Ask by Mary Oliver 

How You Know by Joe Mills

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Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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Poetry Publishing and Money: A primer for beginners

mybooks

It’s manuscript submission time, which for me, means figuring how much I can afford to spend this year on contest and reading fees. So this seems like a good opportunity to talk about poetry books and money, especially for people new to this game.

Friends and family who aren’t authors, and friends who are authors, but trek in the novel world, act surprised when I joke about how little poets make from their books. There are of course poets who make a decent amount of money on books, but they’re rare. A recent article in The Guardian claimed that poetry sales are booming these days, but booming in comparison to what? It’s a small boom when you compare it to popular novels, celebrity biographies, or the latest political tell-all. And most of the top sellers in poetry are either by dead people (Leonard Cohen, Seamus Heaney, Homer) or Instagram poets, not the typical small-press publishing poet in the US.

I’d guess there are maybe a dozen poets in the US who can live off their poetry book sales, maybe 11 now that we lost Mary Oliver. There are maybe 50 more who make a decent amount of money traveling around doing readings at universities (the only places that pay poet a reasonable amount for readings) and doing guest workshops at conferences, but that lifestyle tends to be short-lived and cycles around a poet’s most recent award-winning book. The rest get by with other jobs. Lots of us teach, but many more do other things, and squeeze in readings (usually unpaid) and conferences (sometimes paid, sometimes not) where they try to sell a few books when they can.

Aside from the famous few, most poets make their book money from selling them in person. Few bookstores (despite the resurgence of independent bookstores) offer little more than a couple of dozen poetry titles, and they’re mostly from large presses (large independents like Graywolf and Copper Canyon) and the year’s biggest award winners (plus some Instagram poets and Homer). Amazon of course sells everything, but that company makes it very hard for a publisher to make much of a profit, so by the time the author gets a cut, you’re looking at a year’s sales being enough to buy a case of beer, craft beer if you’re lucky.

Contests, Reading Fees and Costs

What about agents? In poetry, they’re like Bigfoot. You may believe they exist, but very few poets have ever seen one. Only a few poets in the top-tiers of the business (I hate that I wrote business, but I can’t think of another word) have agents, and those tend to only show up once the writer has already achieved success via a big award or other sort of fame. If you’re like most of us, or are just starting out trying to publish, just put the idea of agents out of your mind.

So, back to contests and reading fees, and why. Poetry’s not very profitable. Neither is fly fishing, but people do both out of a love for the thing. Since they know they’re not going to make much or anything selling a book (usually), publishers will try to bring in some of the money up front in the form contest or reading fees which then go toward paying the contest prize, and paying the editors and production costs. Without those fees, as painful as they are for both sides, many good publishers couldn’t stay in business and many books wouldn’t exist. Because poetry publishers rarely give advances anymore, the contest model can be better for poets than a straight-forward royalty arrangement, because what good are royalties if you’re mostly selling the books yourself. Of course that will vary depending on the publisher, the poet, the book and what you want or expect out of the process.

bookboxLet’s say the typical contest prize is $1,000 (some pay out more, few pay out less). I looked at my last three books and saw that I averaged 12 submissions for each one, at about $28 for each submission. That’s $336 spent getting each book published (update–I’ve way exceeded that for my 6th, still-unpublished manuscript). Some of those fees give you the winning book or a subscription to a journal, so they’re not all just lost money. But still, I figure I have to budget at least that much for my next book (see update note above). Let’s say I win one that pays me $1,000 (my last one paid more—Yay! but play along anyway) plus 20 author copies. Of course I’m going to want more than 20, so I pay the author accommodation price, which tends to be fifty or sixty percent of the cover. Let’s say the book costs $16, so my price will be $8 a copy. Pretend I buy 100 copies because I plan to do a lot of readings. That’s $800, plus the $336 I would have spent in contest fees, and I’m already $136 in the hole by the time I’ve signed the contract.

But I’ve got my book (Yay again!) and 120 copies to sell. Of course I have to give some to family and a few friends. Let’s say I give out 25. Then there are review copies. Maybe the publisher sends out some, maybe not. I’ll add another 5. Now I’ve only got 90 copies of the book left and haven’t sold a thing. How about readings—hopefully I’ve set up a lot.

Selling It

Selling books sometimes feels like selling Girl Scout Cookies door-to-door, and the only flavor you have to offer is Trios. Selling books at readings can be hard. In 2018 I did 18 readings (I had two new books to promote). On a good night I’d sell 10. At a typical reading where 12 people show up I may only sell three or four copies. And usually you feel obligated to give the host a free copy (one venue told me that was a requirement). So let’s say you drove 45 minutes to read at a coffee shop, had to buy your own coffee ($4) and pay for parking ($12), sold three copies (at $16 each minus the $8 you paid) and then gave one away ( another lost $8) and drove home to watch Game of Thrones (HBO costs $14 a month). That kind of thing tends to sour a person on readings.

doylestownreading-e1548618397978.jpgWhat about bookstores? Bookstores are great places to read, especially if the place has a long-established reading series, but they present another financial challenge to the writer. Bookstores are in the business of selling books, and they offer you a venue and an audience, so they expect a cut. If you bring your own books, the store will usually expect about a 40% cut. So maybe you sell a few copies, and the store takes 40%, which leaves you with $9.60. But you paid $8 for those books, so now you’ve only made $1.60 per book. How many do you need to sell to make that bookstore reading worth the trip? Of course one good paying gig at a college could make up for several disappointing coffee shops. (Note: I don’t begrudge bookstores their need to make money–they have staff to pay and lights to keep on, but it’s still hard on the small press poet.)

So, when non-writing friend ask me how poets make money on books, I have to factor in things that aren’t directly attached to book sales. Did I get invited to teach at a conference that year? Did I teach a night class workshop? Did I serve as a judge for a poetry contest? Since none of those things would have happened without the existence of my books, I count them as book-related profit. That’s how poetry accounting works—it’s different than regular accounting.

This all sounds like a lot of grousing and complaining. Is it all worth it? That depends on how important money is to the whole scope of being a poet. To me, it’s worth it. Writing, hopefully writing well, and having a book in hand to prove it, is a poet’s marker in the ground that they did something worth saving, worth sharing and worth lasting. Every person or organization who’s helped support a poet, especially the small book publishers, the independent bookstores, the coffee shop readings and the small journals and websites are part of a network creating a legacy for something important to survive. I get value from having a book to show my family, to share with my friends, and knowing that in a few other homes, my book is also being shared—that’s an enormous reward even if it doesn’t pay for much coffee. The readings and events I do to support my work allow me to meet and talk to people I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. It’s led to great conversations and some great friendships.

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It’s Not All Misery: What Mary Oliver Taught Us About Joy

The passing of Mary Oliver, and the subsequent news articles and social media messages about her, made me realize something about contemporary poetry. There’s so little joy in much of it.

The range of emotions and experience available for poets is limitless, yet the predominant themes in journals and books makes it seem like poets choose to spend more of their energy on the darker side of the spectrum. Now there’s a lot to be depressed about today and a lot to be upset about. Clearly social and political issues influence, and sometimes dominate many poets’ work. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Good writing, whether it concerns tragedy, anger, sorrow or grief, is still good writing. And as I said in a previous post, pain lends a poem a kind of emotional energy that’s useful for a poem. In fact, I think negative emotions are easier to drive than positive ones. But that doesn’t mean that every poem has to feel like a gut punch.

Mary Oliver could write grief, sorrow and tragedy as well, very well in fact. But she was also known as a poet of joy–one who actively sought out wonder and beauty on her daily walks. Nature is pretty even at being able to deliver metaphors for struggle and metaphors for success, yet more often, Oliver, maybe an optimist, chose to see the positive. She wanted to be impressed. And that’s kind of the point–both a poetry lesson and a life lesson. Consider the attitude expressed in these lines from her poem “First Snow”

and though the questions

that have assailed us all day

remain–not a single

answer has been found–

walking out now

into the silence and the light

under the trees,

and through the fields,

feels like one.

In my own poems I want to be open to the light more than the dark, and some days that’s harder than others, but seems worth the effort.

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Notes on Poetry Energy

It’s January first, so a lot of people don’t have much energy right now, but poetry energy isn’t about getting up early after a night out, it’s about engagement and control—in your poems and over your reader. One of the elements that makes the best poems the best is their use and control of energy. I’ll try explaining what I mean and how it works below.

  1. Energy, tension and suspense can often be used interchangeably is this discussion, and I will use them that way because I’m kind of lazy. Energy is the push and pull you feel as a reader when you’re progressing through a poem. It’s the pull the poem exerts on you to keep reading, and the push it enacts on your response. Energy makes you want to finish the poem. It’s transferred from the page into the reader and changes your temperature—it’s the gasp or sigh or “oh wow” you exhale at the end.
  2. The strongest energy in poetry is emotion. All emotions are energy—some stronger than others. Some are more efficient (work better, faster, longer) than others. Most successful poems work by managing their emotional energy.
  3. The easiest way to add emotional energy to a poem is to put a person in it. Poems without any people (dogs count as people, but cats don’t) are at an energy disadvantage. Readers seek things in a poem to identify with, to connect to. Without a person as a subject in the poem the reader scrounges around for something to clutch onto. Often the person is the author/speaker—that’s fine. That doesn’t mean that an unpeopled lyric can’t be successful—its just means that it needs to find another way to rev up its energy.
  4. Great poems are often downers. That’s not because all poets are depressed. It’s because negative energy emotions are easier to do than positive energy emotions. It’s easier to trigger someone’s emotions with negative things because that connects with our senses of alarm, sympathy, fear and loathing, than with positive things—unless you’re talking about cute dog videos. Joy is harder to do (in poetry and in life), which is probably why there’s less of it, and is one reason I was so thrilled to stumble upon this anthology by James Crews. My own theory on why negative emotions are more common in poetry is that they’re heavier and drive us to action (to write about them, correct them, drown them with wine…), while positive emotions drive us to revel in the moment rather than reflect on how we got there.
  5. So, to continue from point #4, if you want to add emotional energy, put a person in the poem. If you want to increase the emotional energy then drive home the negative (make the person suffer—poems with people happily sitting around at dinner have more trouble raising emotional energy than poems about someone hit by a milk truck). This doesn’t make you a bad person. It just shows you’re sensitive to the suffering of others and want to explore (not exploit) this aspect of humanity. But don’t ignore joy, celebration, and gratitude as well–when done skillful, those poems also are wonderful, like this one by Barbara Crooker.
  6. Energy can be increased with rhetorical techniques as well. Anaphora (repetition) is a great way to increase energy because the repetition of a word or phrase triggers our need for recognition and confirmation. Questions increase energy because they trigger the reader’s need for answers. Turns (such as the volta in sonnets) are great ways to manipulate energy because by shifting direction, they add tension, surprise, introspection, and maybe, resolution.
  7. Line breaks and enjambment can help manipulate the energy in a poem by affecting the pace of the image. Like the use of short lines or long lines, breaks are way to add and build tension.
  8. Like a spring or a bow and arrow, energy in a poem can be built up and released.
  9. All poems are triangles. They either start narrow (at the point) and expand as they progress, or they start wide and compress or shed excess to a fine point at the end.
  10. A simile is a micro example of the energy process. The first part of the simile (the description of the original thing, also called the tenor) is the pulling back of the bow to build energy, then the new thing it’s being compared to (the vehicle) is release. That’s why similes feel so good—they’re these little micro energy moments in a poem.
  11. I might be wrong about all this. Do your own thing.

Note: this post was slightly updated 6/28/22

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Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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How to Organize or Arrange A Poetry Book, GPS Style

easton to pittsburgh

A friend who’s starting to put together a poetry collection asked me recently if I had any tips for how to organize a book. I suggested the standard practice of thinking about the book as having a story or arc, and organizing it around that. And while I still think that’s pretty decent advice, it’s also pretty vague. I also told her I personally like to end on a note of hope and look for the poem that will leave the reader with that feeling, and that’s when I realized what I actually was doing with my own organization strategy—I was creating a map toward hope.

So with that in mind, here are a few things I do or think about when organizing a collection of poems. I’m not much of an authority at this. I’ve only published five books, and I’m not a press editor, but here are principles that help guide me.

Focus on the destination

Think of the book as a trip. On a trip, unless you’re just aimlessly wandering, you usually pick the destination before you start driving. You punch the addresses into your phone, view the route, and then hit the road. Every so often you get a reminder to turn left at the next intersection or exit the highway via the off ramp. None of the individual steps along the route could happen if you hadn’t picked the destination first. When organizing a book, I’ll look for the final poem first (or at least early in the process). That poem is the destination. It’s where I want the reader to arrive at the end of the journey. As I stated earlier, I usually want to end on something hopeful, to leave the reader knowing that whatever happened earlier in the book, that all is not lost. If you want the reader to end on X feeling, you need to know what steps, turns or transformations will need to occur to bring them there.

Detours matter

Most poetry books today (including mine) are broken into smaller sections. Sometimes these sections are thematically linked to tell a particular story (the first parts of both The Trouble with Rivers and Reckless Constellations focus on specific people and narratives). Think of those sections as necessary detours on your trip—but they still need to function as steps toward your goal. If you’re driving across Pennsylvania, you may make detours to visit the Anthracite Museum or Gettysburg, but how will those stops contribute to the overall experience of the trip? How will they help bring you to the end of the book? Do they support a transformation that happens in the book? Do they expand or contribute to themes you’re working toward?

Plan for rest stops

You can’t get through a long trip without stopping to pee now and then. You’ll need breaks, deviations, places to stretch your back, get some coffee. This can be true with poetry collections as well. Too much of one thing gets tiring, even if those things are very good. A friend called one of my poems a “park bench poem,” a sort of poem that allows the reader to take a breath, release the tension. Rests are part of the trip and necessary to reach the goal. Without a break now and then a book, especially one with emotionally intense poems, can be a bit overwhelming. Use rest stops sparingly, and make them useful to the whole, but use them.

Turn by turn directions

No journey (well, few at least) is a straight line. Every turn is a moment for consideration. Every turn is a choice. Your individual poems are also choices, and those choices have consequence in how the book unfolds. The order of your poems, like turns on a trip, can either get you closer to your destination or lead you away from it. You can also end up going around in circles without advancing further toward the goal. I write a lot of fishing poems, but I’ve never grouped them all together just because they’re all about fishing. That would be like getting stuck in one of those terrible New Jersey loop intersections. Instead, I’ll think of what each of the fishing poems is doing, what experience it’s leading the reader in and how it helps us get to the destination.

Going home

Sometimes, as in life and Lifetime movies, a book’s destination is the same place you started. But in order to realize that, the book has go through the motions of leaving home, process the experiences of being away, and eventually find its way back. The journey itself must still be important, otherwise you wouldn’t have written the poems. It may be a round trip, but it’s still a trip.

Of course there are other ways to organize a poetry book, or, as Hayden Carruth did in Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, don’t organize them at all. These are just ideas that help me. You can do your own thing.

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Revising is sometimes knowing when to stop writing

trail sign2

About a month ago, maybe more, I was hiking some woods I didn’t know very well. I’d been there only once before and hadn’t gone far along the trail, so this day was for exploring further. These certainly were some gorgeous woods–huge boulders tinted with moss and lichen, mixed oak and hickory trees that left a thick cereal of leaves, twigs and nuts on the ground, and a light covering of snow that shifts normal perspectives.

So Emmett, my dog, and I tramped down into the hollow toward a creek, back up along a rocky ridge, cut into a wider path that led to a logger’s opening, then back into the protected part of the woods where the trail zigzagged and upped and downed, until after a few hours, my feet were getting pretty sore, the sun was no longer warming my back, and even Emmett looked ready to curl up in the back seat of the car. But we were probably 40 minutes from the pulloff where it was parked.

By now the much of the fascination with these new woods had faded, and was instead replaced with thoughts of my aching insoles and frequent glances at the trail map to decipher the shortest route out of there. Emmett had stopped peeing on every rock, so I knew he was thinking the same thing.

That feeling of having gone too far is also familiar to me in my writing, and usually it’s a moment that comes up during the initial draft of a poem, or shortly after when I’m building on an initial jumble of words. That first impulse to write a poem can often be sort of directionless. But that’s also what makes it exciting. One of the biggest thrills I get from writing is the discovery that happens on the way through a first draft, and that’s very similar to the feeling I get when I first set off on a hike along a trail or a kayak trip down a creek. The difference is that with a hike, once your realize you’ve gone too far, you generally know where you need to return to (and hopefully you know how to get there.). With poem, it’s harder to know just when things took a wrong turn.

This came to me this morning, when I was reading Raymond Carver’s poem, conveniently tilted This Morning. In the poem he’s going for a walk and eventually reaches a point where he starts to take in the world and reflect… ie, gets poetic about it. It’s a good moment, and he carries it off for a few lines until the perfect moment of insight ends with the line “I know I did.” I would love if the poem just ended there with that sudden self awareness. 

Unfortunately, as good a poet as Carver was, he was also known to not be great at self editing (thank you Gordon Lish). The poems goes on for four more lines, which really just drags out and diminishes the wonderful moment that happened with “I know I did.”

So how do you know? Ah, well, that’s the hard part. Sometimes it’s just recognizing that you’ve made your point, hit your mark and now you’re just saying it again with different words or new images.

Writing beyond the ending is something I see pretty frequently in poems, usually by younger poets who can’t resist the impulse to just keep walking on down that trail. It’s also something I’m prone to myself, a lot. After I’ve put my first efforts on the page I go back and carefully feel out whether the poem went too far. Usually this requires some time or distance. I need to put it down for a few days, or read someone else in between, so I’m not hung up on my own endorphin rush from writing. Walking is different. You know when you’ve gone too far, but sometimes by the time you know there are already blisters on your feet and you just have to suffer through them until you get home.