Putting Together a Poetry Collection

 Well, it's done I finally pressed send on my third collection and now, hopefully, it is in the hands/in tray of my editor. I just hope she likes it. 

One of the hardest things about putting together a poetry collection is whittling it down to a manageable size. I got mine down from well over a hundred pages to just under ninety - but I know it will have to get even smaller. 

The process goes something like this:

Print out all poems and decide which are strong enough to go in the collection. 

Look at what themes are emerging and group poems according to theme.

Decide if you want sections and what order they will be in (this can change later).

Order poems within their sections and think about how sections link together - is it a logical progression, does the end poem of one section link to the first poem of the next one.

Section order may be somewhat led my your strongest poems - you want your strongest poems first and last. Also think about how you want the reader to feel when they finish the collection. I always like to put a positive poem last.

Take anything out that feels like filler or poems that are doing a similar thing to each other - you are bound to have some of these - writers often explore the same ideas over and over. I don't necessarily mean poems on the same theme but poems that have a similar feel or message - pick the strongest. 

If you can get someone to read it and give you their impressions. If you can afford a mentor I would highly recommend it. People we workshop with regularly tend to be less critical because they already know our work - I like to (if I can) get someone to read it who hasn't read/workshopped the poems as I have been writing them. Having an outside reader can be vital. They can pick up if the order doesn't make sense or isn't working. With my first two collections I had funding for a mentor and she helped me make some really tough editorial decisions - changing order, taking out poems (and writing more to replace them) and crucially putting a strong sequence first - I had been a little scared of doing that for some reason. With the collection I just sent off, a friend read through it and flagged up a problem with the order of the final section which we were then able to fix.

Don't be afraid to take stuff out and write more. 

Don't feel that everything that has been published has to go in. Similarly not all your best poems have to go in. A collection is not your greatest hits - it should work coherently. I have a sequence of poems that is really strong but it just hasn't fitted with my last book or this one.

Back to the Old Question of Order

 I am back to the old question of how to order my collection - having put together a pamphlet sized collection - I then expanded it to a full collection - however I knew in my heart of hearts that some of the poems weren't entirely up to scratch. This was confirmed when my mentor looked at it. She earmarked some poems to take out and some to work on some more and some themes that I could pursue further.  Luckily I had already been writing some new and what I consider to be more exciting work. I had been thinking that I would save this new work but now I am thinking that it will be the nucleus of the collection (along with the sequence of prose poems).

I feel like I have worked hard on this collection - pushing myself to edit and re-edit and pushing the boundaries of my writing.  I now have to reconsider my order. I had put the poems in a kind of chronological order - starting with poems about childhood. This I now realise is a little obvious - I need to be more subtle, to find other more tenuous connections between the poems.

Next week I am devoting a full five days to working on what I have - I am excited and a little scared. I will be away from the Internet and my usual distractions. I will be forced to face myself and my writing demons.

Getting Closer

I feel like I am getting closer to an idea of how I want to order my collection now and I have a working title as well. One of the most difficult choices is what things to put in and what things to leave out. I tend to find that I don't ever really like much of my work that is over a year old - but used that as a criteria for will go in the collection it will be very thin.  I have a body of work that I produced on my MA at UEA but I am not really keen on much of it now - and anything written before that is almost definitely out.

The only thing that I know for certain at this juncture is that my sequence of prose poems is definitely going in, and some of my poems about transformation.  The prose poems have a fairly unique voice and at one point I had thought that I might wait until I had enough of them for a mini collection or a pamphlet - the trouble is that I have flurries of writing them and then I don't write any for ages. Each time I write one I think that now I am surely done with them, but then a month or so later another one pops out.

How to order a collection

So I have finally come back to thinking about putting a collection of poems - or at least a pamphlet sized collection - that I can send off to publishers. There are several reasons why I have been putting it off and these include lack of time and fear of rejection.  Still the time has come and today I began thinking about how I would ever put the poems I have into some kind of order. This led me to thinking about what the overriding themes are within my work and I narrowed it down to: childhood/family, loss/alienation and other poems - it is these other poems that are the most problematical to place. Some of them are about place e.g. rivers, forests, journeys) but others are more abstract and harder to define.  It is hard to know how to put this body of work together in any kind of comprehensible order.  I have thought of moving through the work as if it is a life cycle starting with poems about childhood moving through to adulthood but that leaves me wondering how to place the poems about nature and other subjects. It also made me wonder do I mix my prose poems which are about a fictional family amongst more personal poems about childhood? These are difficult questions and as yet I have come up with no definite answers.