Poets are primarily interested in death and commas.
—Carolyn Kizer

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Poem and Prompt

Craft Tips

The following list of organizational possibilities is reprinted from The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics.

Finding Your Book
 
                        —Alberto Rios
 
The following are some useful ways of thinking about manuscript organization, with the intent of letting your book show itself to you. Try all of these, and listen carefully each time to what the newly gathered manuscript has to say.


1. Temporal Narrative suggests time as your editor. This is an old, but often effective, approach. Time orders things in an often unexpected but logical way. Temporal narrative might be the order in which the poems were written, the age of the speaker, or temporal indicators within the poems themselves.

   

2. Backward Temporal Narrative can also be effective. If you walk along a hiking trail one way and see certain things, returning along that trail ought to be equally coherent and connected, with the same view of things, but new.
   
   When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.—Pablo Picasso
    
3. Nature can be an organizing schema. You might group your poems by season or elements, literally or metaphorically. Poems about fall, for example, would include anything that drops or expends energy. Winter poems would include anything about dormancy.


    
4. Organic approaches are based on the physical qualities of the items described. For example, a book of love poems might be organized by head, neck, clavicle, chest, and, uh, toes.


    
5. Link by Colors, by Smells. We’re talking about the senses here, but be loose or open in your sensibility. Include a poem with a red object in it, even—and especially—if the word red does not come up in the poem, and pair it with another poem containing something else that is red in it. Link poems or sections by smells, by tastes, by senses we haven’t even discovered yet.


    
6. Orchestrated Structures link dissimilar ideas that share a single characteristic. Rather than linking all the poems about ice cream, for example, this might simply be the joining of a group of poems about Antarctica, the last look of a partner you’ve just broken up with, the broken icemaker in your refrigerator, and songs about Christmas. The connection is clear—cold—but the circumstances are not at all necessarily joined.


    
7. Logical Sequence involves identifying what a reader needs to know in order to understand the next thing, then ordering the poems so that they make sense. This is like climbing a ladder. 
    
8. Spiral Structures are chains of associations based on similarity. The spiral should be like a hawk circling slowly in and down. In the spiral structure one line speaks to another in a long chain; the movement is not circular and closed but slowly and evenly forward.
   
   We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
/ Will be to arrive where we started /And know the place for the first time.—T. S. Eliot


    
9. Mosaic structuring uses many small fragments to tell a larger story. Like a mosaic, the individual poems are bits of color and shape. From a distance, as the reader stands back and puts them all together, a picture emerges. A mystery is well-served by this form, though the process serves many kinds of manuscripts. The test of this form is, of course, that something clear must emerge.


    
10. Objective Ordering may be appropriate depending on the subject of the manuscript. If the book is about the anonymity of force, you might want to use untitled poems identified by only number. You might alphabetize the poems by the first word. You might throw the poems up into the air and order them according to the whim of their landing. Objectivity, if you can truly live with it, suggests a sense of metaphysics—that something out there, rather than us, is in control—or the more troubling suggestion of what has been called pataphysics—that neither we nor anything else out there is in control. Getting a reader to understand this, however, might take an author’s note.


     
11. Alphabetizing is a strong but deceptive organizer, both whimsical and efficient at the same time—while being neither finally. It simply offers an effective foundation for letting the manuscript speak for itself. Related to Objective Ordering, it is an institutionalized version of throwing your poems up in the air and letting the order settle itself. The trouble, of course, with these methods is that you will not be able to stick with them. Something will trouble you, or you will want to just exchange one poem for another in the order. Examine this feeling. The ordering sensibility you are looking for may be resident in your inability to truly let objectivity order the manuscript.


     
12. Eccentric Structures involve oddities or non sequitur thinking linked together by virtue of their lack of connection. Surrealism made a mighty attempt at this, and succeeded in large measure by finding value in what would seem at first meaningless and nonsensical. Psychotherapy often plays in this garden as well.

     
13. Last-line-First-line Dialogue is the most whimsical and often the most fun. See what the last line of a poem would connect to in the first line of another poem. This will establish a dialogue among the poems in the book. Even though you may also realistically need to consider the second line and the second-to-last line, the idea is to forget about the body of the poem and just look at what the first and last lines have to say to one another. This creates a coherent book in its in-between spaces, and gives a surprising sense of motion or connection in the moment—that is, connection where we do not expect to find it.


     
14. The Old Neighborhood is still something to count on, an indestructible, definable, visceral, and tangible home-ness. I am talking here about place, which—if you know something about one—you ought to consider. Geography is a natural connector, and an exasperating separator.

Video
Maria Mazziotti Gillan and the Patterns of Memory

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Book Reviews of The Strategic Poet

Compulsive Reader, by Claire Hamner Matturro

Mom Egg Review, by Lara Lillibridge

Heavy Feather Review, by Deborah Bacharach

Splash Magazine, by Michele Caprario


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Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers

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