In response to my last post, Miss Redd writes:
Pre-creating a book of poems before the book of poems has been written seems like an elaborate and tricky solution to the relatively simple project of putting a selection of poems in some kind of order. It is possible to discover such an order ex post facto by examining the relationships between the poems once they’ve been written.
This is where the opposition of the “poetry book” to the “book of poems,” as Brouwer put it, leaves us; opposing—whether simply in the order of priority or in the final form—the order of the book to the centrality of The Poem or the discreteness (and therefore, perhaps, the viability) of any one poem.
But this is not just about order, it also is about the idea that the book itself may be a form or a higher level of order—which may be more visible in a “project book” or “poetry book,” but which is nevertheless visible (and, perhaps, in some cases more captivating) in what Meitner and Vandenberg call the “mix-tape book.”
Robert Frost said (or wrote, or is supposed to have said), “If you have a book of twenty-four poems, the book itself should be the twenty-fifth poem.” (See also Traci Brimhall and Natasha Trethewey on this, and also this.) Which is to say that, even in what appears to be a miscellany—or a poet’s collection of the last so many years of work—there may be not only an arrangement (best words, best order : best poems, best order) but an idea or conceit.
I used to think—even when I was devouring books like Seamus Heaney’s North or Nathaniel Mackey’s Eroding Witness or Sylvia Plath’s Ariel—that whatever conceit I saw in the order of poems was organic, even accidental. As a student at Auburn University, I had occasion, as I was working on my undergraduate thesis, to ask R. T. Smith about the last poem in his book The Cardinal Heart — a poem that, in a book of beautiful strong poems, seemed unusually strong and strangely sure. He had written it purposefully, he explained, as the book’s final poem; having winnowed his poems down to a sensible collection and put them in the best order, there was still something missing that would help tie the book together. That last poem, “Sloe Gin,” resonates strangely as the major themes, developed in the rest of the book, harmonize in one chord; the poem seems to sing louder than many others, if only because it’s the first place I could hear the book’s sounding structure, feel the wood of it hum.
A good, well-developed book, whether seemingly more organic or not, whether “project-y” or not, will carry that kind of resonance—even when it seems the formal plan of the book must have come together before most of its constituent poems. Take, for example, Rusty Morrison’s The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story. The formal program is clear: each poem, entitled “please advise stop,” is 9-lines long; each line of each poem ends with one of those three words, so that the poems read, somewhat, like telegrams. [You can read one of these poems here and another here.] This program is so clear, and so clearly describable, that it can seem like a gimmick, considered in the abstract. But neither Morrison nor Ahsahta Press pushes this aspect of the book to the fore in the marketing copy, so you can enter it, aware that there’s a formal restraint and coherence, without fixing on this aspect immediately. In a field of formally similar poems, you quickly begin to focus on the variations on the form—and on the poems’ matter, which explores the poet’s loss of her father.
As Morrison explains:
This cycle of poems began with the words that end each line: “stop,” “please,” and “please advise.” Their urgency—their complex of entreaty, desire, anxiety, and even a bit of humor—generated a perceptual position, and a form, that allowed a kind of articulation and compression that I hadn’t previously been able to sustain. Sometime soon after I began these poems, my father contracted pneumonia, and then he died within a few days of being admitted to the hospital. He had other physical problems, illnesses, but there’d been no reason to expect he would die so suddenly.
In this poem cycle I was able to work through some of the shock of such an enormous absence made so viscerally present. And, as the manuscript evolved, I found this work to be a means of questioning my perception of the interrelationships among many of the other presences and absences that make up what I understand as reality.
In some respects, the form of these poems may remind the reader of a telegram. In many ways, the poems did emerge as a communication to an elsewhere, or I might say, a communication to the now-right-here—the moment’s immediacy—which I too often fail to realize.
So, the form and formal idiom of the poems, however telelgraphic, however historical, melds with the book’s matter—and the book, which could be described without argument as a project book (Morrison describes it as a “poem cycle”), is a powerful book, emotionally, intellectually, formally. Individual poems are captivating, but taken together the book is greater than the sum of its parts.
And it’s this over-sum, this twenty-fifth-poem-ness I mean when I speak of the book as a form—a form that can relate the address of a single poem to its neighborhood or city without (maybe) become as large as a long poem (on which more soon).