Poets: Where did you learn how to write a book?
By Barbara Jane Reyes | October 27, 2011
I am asking this, because as we had extra time in MFA workshop yesterday evening, I promised my students a bit of a book talk and opportunity for them to ask me questions regarding creating a full-length poetry collection.
I told them I was wary of using their time to talk about myself, though for sure they were appreciative of this. One student said it’d be selfish for me not to share my own experiences, so this confirmed I was doing the right thing. I did talk about the specific ideas that germinated into Poeta en San Francisco and Diwata, how Poeta began with an interaction on the corner of 16th and Valencia, how Diwata began with an intricate piece of line art by Niki Adnyani, whose blog I’d casually stumbled upon — and then she seemed to have retreated from blog-world and I never heard from her again. I think now, funny how these chance and brief encounters can end up meaning everything.
One student did ask what was my first step. I said just writing, almost catharsis-like, purge-like, to try to achieve clarity, and then to open myself up beyond the initial idea or germ. How did an encounter on 16th and Valencia lead me back to Apocalypse Now, travel guide language, Mission Dolores, et al, and how did Adnyani’s line art lead me back to Philippine mythological females, and to the biblical Eve. Both of these are still kind of mysterious to me, or maybe I’ve talked about it so many times, I just don’t remember how it actually went down.
But with these bits of nascent ideas, the writing grows, and the concept of the collection grows or morphs or evolves, or takes on different layers, and how this determines what to read, view, research. And then how to write from those, how to decide what to do with the informing texts, images, media — engage, “translate,” mis-translate, rewrite, reenvision, retell.
We talked a bit about form, the prose form that appears in Diwata, as many of my students are reading Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual in another class. I told them what Sesshu said in a talk he did at City Lights Books, that he didn’t want his line breaks and enjambments to be “cute,” and so therefore, writing the continuous lines of the prose poem. I told them it made sense in Diwata, because I wanted to go back to some good old fashioned storytelling.
Then there’s the larger question of how to order and manage an immensely growing body of work from beginning to end. I have to say, I think a lot of it is intuitive; if we know our work and our projects well, then we can envision a beginning, a middle, and an end. I am wondering though, can it be that basic?
One student asked whether my thesis advisor, Stacy Doris, who I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, encouraged or guided me through manuscript submission process, and I said that yes, she definitely encouraged to seek out presses that I thought could be a “good fit.” So then that got me thinking of what “good fit” means; how could a press be a good fit. I think this is above and beyond thesis advising, and I totally appreciate the vision, having been encouraged to think of my work having a place and a life out there.
I can also tell you that right as I was starting grad school, Eileen Tabios gave me this gem of manuscript advice — start strong and end strong. It’s up to you to figure out the trajectory of the in-between. Then towards the tail end of workshopping Poeta,Oliver de la Paz told me not to try to “fill in holes” in the manuscript’s body, I suppose because those pieces would be obvious as filler. And this makes sense to me; if the meat/substance of the manuscript is already there, then you already have a lot to work with. If, as Willie Perdomo has said, a poem is like an engine in which each part serves a specific function, then we can say the same of the book. Yes?
Anyway, so my question is — poets, were you specifically taught how to write a book, how to compile a poetry collection? Who taught you this? Do professors teach you/us how to do this? Does writing your thesis really = writing a book?
4 Comments
Oliver de la Paz on October 27, 2011 at 2:44 pm.
I learned a lot from Alberto Ríos in terms of what to look for as I structured my book, but his advice was specific to the one book I had been writing, NAMES ABOVE HOUSES. He did have several handouts and suggestions with regard to collections, but really they were bare templates that I didn’t follow.
Most of what I “know” with regard to the structure of a book comes from reading a lot of poetry collections and discerning what structures are intuitive, what structures are laboring, and what structures are buckling. And I mean I learned by reading whole collections of poetry–I don’t skim from poem to poem or read the poetic highlights when I read collections. I read them from cover to cover.
I think professors can teach a general sense of structural modes and models, but the real value that professors can provide their students is the ability to read a collection so that the individual’s understanding of a collection is individualized.
And no, I don’t think a thesis is necessarily the same as a book, even though my thesis would eventually become my first book. Though a thesis is a good place to learn how to put together a manuscript.
Bryan Thao Worra on October 27, 2011 at 3:53 pm.
Most of the time it was a DIY process. I went through making a lot of chapbooks after I’d though I had enough poems that were interlinked enough that it made sense to have them all together in one place. And then it was just experimenting and tweaking. Sometimes I’ve come up with a great organizing structure so the poems work individually or linearly, others, less so. But I agree with Oliver, there’s a lot of reading of other books of poetry and books of not-poetry you ought to do, cover-to-cover.
It feels good to me when I look at the final manuscript and say, “I’m hungry for more but if I put in any more, I’m just kitchen-sinking it.”
Lyle Daggett on October 28, 2011 at 9:39 pm.
Nobody taught me (in any conventional classroom sense) how to put together a book of poems. The first time I remember really consciously trying to think about structuring a book, sequenciing poems, etc. — really struggling to understand it — was when I read Denise Levertov’s book Relearning the Alphabet (I was in high school at the time, I think 16 years old, and had been writing poems for a couple of years), which I found somewhat difficult, both the individual poems and how Levertov grouped and sequenced them. (I’ve gone back to the book now and then over the years and I still find it challenging.)
My first book, which I self-published in 1976, had 14 poems which were all pretty recent (mostly written within 3 or 4 months of when I published the book). I tried to do the “start strong and end strong” thing you talk about here, that was my intent at any rate. I still try to do that when I’m putting a book of poems together.
My second book (16 poems) was also a kind of bric-a-brac of poems, mostly fairly recent at the time, though I included a couple from a few years earlier.
In my later books of poems I’ve had more of a sense early on that a coherent manuscript was taking shape, and in one of my notebooks I keep track of which poems are (at least tentatively) going to be in which manuscript, which I find necessary since I’m typically working on four or five manuscripts in progress at any given time. It was nearly 20 years between my second published book of poems and my third one. In part this is because I was consciously trying to finish work on books of poems, manuscripts, rather than just throwing together a hodgepodge of whatever poems were handy and recent.
What seems to hold the poems together in a manuscript for me, at least initially, is some kind of underlying commonality or affinity of subject matter or content (either exterior/explicit or interior/implicit, or some of each), or sometimes, a commonality or affinity of tone or texture. Or some combination of these. It’s complicated. If I find certain words or places or “scenes” recurring in several poems, that sometimes (not always) is an indicator that the poems should be together in a manuscript. This is what happens most typically –
But not always. Earlier this year I finished work on a manuscript that I’d begun in 1984, made up mostly of a long series of connected poems, growing out of traveling for a few days on the west coast with a poet friend back in 1984. I began that book by making an outline of the individual poems I wanted to write, and the sequence of the poems, which was more or less held together by the narrative (sometimes exterior and sometimes more interior) of traveling along the coast and the places we stopped at and passed through along the way. And I stuck to the outline, and the poem sequence, and worked straight through from beginning to end, which seemed the only way to write it without losing the various threads of whatever is going on in the poems and from one poem to another.
The book that’s forthcoming right now is a New and Selected Poems, which brings together poems from a period of about 30 years (I think the earliest poems in the manuscript are a couple from the late ’70′s). About a third of the poems are from four previous books, and the rest haven’t been in books before. I’ve grouped them in four sections in the book, and I’ve sequenced them based more or less on either similarity or (sometimes) contrast of tone from one poem to the next.
Except for the long book I’ve described above (the connected series of poems about traveling on the west coast), I normally don’t try to find any sort of narrative “arc” or anything similar when I’m putting together a book or poems. For me it’s generally about listening as carefully as I can to how each poem follows and precedes the poems before and after it in the sequence.
One “exercise,” for lack of a better word, that I’ve found useful, and that I’ve done from time to time for many years, is to pick out some poems I like by a variety of poets, 10 or 12 or 15 poems, and I’ll pretend I’m putting together a small anthology, and I’ll play with arranging the poems, listening to which ones follow which others well. I’ve found this good practice for putting together manuscripts of my own poems. One advantage it has is that since the poems are by other poets, I don’t have all kinds of emotional investment in them, and it’s easier to listen to the qualities in the poems, and to learn how to listen.
Lily Rodulfo on December 20, 2011 at 10:43 am.
Thank you for sharing. I found your entry very helpful, as I, a novice, identified with your just starting out. I will look for Levertov’s book . . . and yours. Thanks again.