What makes a book of poems? What calls a group of poems together? What kinds of progressions and disunities give life to the collection?
These are questions I’ve been tangled in as I’ve worked on assembling a manuscript. Like a swarm or school (as described in this New York Times article on swarm logic), the manuscript results from forces of coherence and disjunction. Like the swarm, a book of poems must move and do its work, but it must also hang together.
Enter the voices in my head. On one hand, there’s an Aristotelian angel asking for a book in which each poem necessarily belongs to the others and to the group. On the other hand, there’s a seductive piece of advice I read years ago in Poets and Writers’ debut poetry feature. From Thomas Sayers Ellis: “Forget the word book. Resist the trend of thematic series. Practice all forms of literacy–visual and emotional, too. Admit that there’s more than one of you; and surprise and embarrass all of yourselves.” (The trend that Sayers Ellis refers to is both noticeable and discussed. See question #8 in this interview with Peter Jay Shippy, posted just yesterday on Ploughshares’ blog: “coherent is the new organic.” In my own experience as a reader for Burnside Review, I see many submissions from thematic series.) Then there are the writing friends. Most have said, in effect, trust your gut. “Each poem needs a mate,” my mate said, sweetly.
And I think of books whose accretive quality has been in some way remarkable, often more so than the individual poems. On one hand, leaving one-poem books aside for now, there’s a book like Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie (excerpted here), a series related by narrative, setting, subject, and form. There’s Yusef Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods, in which the poems are visually and formally unified but invigorated by the juxtaposition of quite various subject matters.
And there’s also a way in which the book qua book doesn’t matter at all. Speaking at least for myself, I usually remember poems rather than books, which could be because classes and anthologies present poems outside their original context. Maybe the best book is simply the book with the best poems.
Provisionally I think, given the material I have, my unifying factor is neither a voice, nor (quite) a story, nor “themes,” but a world. I am most satisfied as a reader when a book of poems occupies a world, a landscape made of places, events, voices, and concerns, and in which the language of the poems also lives. Somehow this vague notion is, at least for now, sufficient in helping me decide which poems belong and which do not. It’s a loose kind of unity that allows multiple “selves,” multiple voices, multiple forms. The found poem may exist beside–and draw energy from–the riddle, the invocation, the sonnet cycle, or the experiment. As I see it, my remaining task is striving, both in the finishing and in the compiling, for every other kind of variety.
In closing I’ll throw out a question. Which books of poetry are exemplary or interesting or memorable in the way they function as books? And what’s working there, what defines that functioning? (OK, two questions).
P.S. On an unrelated note, A.E. Stallings is now contributing to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, as insightful there as she is delightful in verse.