Mila Zinkova

I recently learned the hard way: It is no small feat to organize a book of poetry. A mere 48 poems, most of them confined to a single page, most of them seventeen or eighteen lines—(is that a feature or a bug?)—what could be so challenging about figuring out an order in which to present them to the world?

I told myself, This is not rocket science. Or even science fiction.

I decided to start with the Name Game.

I had already been shopping for a new title, an umbrella that could better cover a manuscript that included new work and the poems that had previously appeared in my chapbook. I went through the poems themselves to see if any language in them might be title-worthy. The few titles that jumped out were not from the strongest poems in the collection. Hmm. I’d recently had loads of fun skimming Bartlett’s Shakespeare Quotations for language I loved, that I might someday use as titles. 

By that point, I was more than familiar with every stanza, line, word, syllable, maybe even sound in most if not all of my poems. I read through all those gorgeous bits of Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Since more than few of my poems talked about rivers, water, and floods, as well as desire and longing, I homed in on any language that might contain the slightest allusive echo of that—including this from Henry VI, Part III [IV, 8]:

A little fire is quickly trodden out; 
Which, being suffer’d, rivers cannot quench.

Which rivers…when rivers…whose rivers…what rivers cannot quench—I ran through my options, editing the Bard to suit my titling purposes. What Rivers Cannot Quench. Poetic, the right amount of lofty but also elemental. And I like totally love the letter Q. Hmm. Methinks I have a title.

I immediately put my tentative new title to the test as a tool to organize the book. I had help with that from two other sources. Last year, in the May/June 2008 issue of Poets & Writers, I’d stumbled on “Putting Your Poetry in Order”, an article about that exact subject. The author, Katrina Vandenberg, insists that finding the right order is “more art than science.” Her article is a “mix-tape” of the best advice she’s ever gotten on how to order poems. You can actually listen to the songs that she has used to illustrate her strategies. Elvis Costello. The Beatles. The Velvet Underground. Aretha. Tom Waits. I pulled out my photocopy of the article. Even though I think the author overreaches with her mix-tape analogy, a few nuggets of wisdom awaited:

—Order can make a poet’s obsessions more rather than less interesting,

—The white space between poems can—and maybe should?—function as a form of innuendo.

—Sometimes poems that won’t work alone can find a home in the lineup of a book, providing links, or needed contrast, texture, and resonance.

—It matters what poems you put side by side; they do interact, speak to one another, even chime.

—The right order implies coherence. And a whole work that is “greater than the sum of its parts…a poem made from all of your poems.”

In the section characterized by Graham Parker’s tune “Back to Schooldays” Vandenberg writes: “Sections are often the building blocks of good books. Each section…needs its own theme…within sections, something from the last poem has to link to the next one.” She then describes working with the poet, Pattiann Rogers, to break her motley tribe of poetry into smaller clusters of, let’s say, three poems each.

OK, I had a whole batch of poems ostensibly about one subject—the suicide of a friend—and I couldn’t imagine that they would be able to work scattered throughout a volume. So right from the get-go, a no-brainer: Gotta have sections! But how then to sort the rest of the poems? It helped that I knew two simple things from the start:   

1.    If I had sections I would want an odd number because I love odd numbers. So at a minimum, there would be three sections.

2.   That the “suicide poems” would likely work best in the middle, an apex, a crescendo, a story-within-a-story. And because many of those poems dealt with an actual event that is an end-point in itself—a suicide/death—I decided to let time guide the chronology of this middle section. 

With my maybe title in the back of my mind— and the middle section established as well— I then did a read-through of every poem that might make the final cut. I made notes as to recurring themes, ideas, connections, and so on, always with an eye (and ear) as to how I could aggregate poems into these smaller sections and still maintain a “narrative flow.” My goal was coherence, an overall “voice and tone” as well as narrative.

A batch was (and all this is very roughly speaking) about journeys and fleeing and exile. Another group was what I called the “sexy” set. Yet another seemed to be about family, relationships, other people and their stories. Then there were the misfits. I put them aside and tackled the other three piles first. I returned to an outstanding article by Alberto Rios. It catalogues an amazingly diverse set of possibilities to consider when organizing a poetry book.

I’d organized my chapbook using a combination of Rios’s “last-line-first-line dialogue” with a nod to a spiral structure—meaning associations based on similarity—as well. I wanted the book to flow, homage to its title and subject matter. Since I already knew the book would have sections, these two Rios strategies jumped out as possibilities:

—Partnered or Thematic Grouping. For example, cluster all the poems about ice cream together or all the stories with a single image or shared leitmotiv.

—Orchestrated Structures. This links dissimilar ideas that share a single characteristic. It isn’t necessarily a literal linking of what the poems are about but a connection or link that is a level above that.

I made simple notes as I read through each poem that had found its way into my potential section piles. I looked for repeated words, themes, obsessions, etc. (This was also a good way to do any final edits to the poems, too) and made lists. While doing this, I noticed that certain poems seemed to want to be next to one another, to work as partners, so I made a note of that.

I took all my lists and tried to find any commonality in what was there. I turned my new title into a question—What can’t rivers quench?—and looked for an “answer word” that might serve as a section title.

I was after nouns or verbs, words that were somehow elemental and concrete,  ones that broadly encapsulated the pieces in each section. And I also wanted each section to elegantly segue, somehow speak to the one that would come next. With some tinkering and feedback from a poetry pal who knows my work well, I ended up with these five:  Flight/Tributaries/Straits/Thirst/Breath.

Once I had these section titles, I was on Easier Street as far as finding a flow and being able to re-arrange the poems, to showcase conversations between pieces in each section.

Last but not least, I had to decide which poem would come first and which last, the collection’s bookends so to speak. That turned out to be simpler than I thought it would be. Pretty early on, I knew I wanted to use the same final poem as I’d had in the chapbook because it is quiet, elegiac, and is, to my ear, a true coda. But I picked a different opening poem than the one I’d used in my chapbook, one that started an immediate dialogue with the book’s title and signaled the “theme” of that first section—journeys, river, seeking voice and answers in poetry. The poem? “These Miles to My River.” Thank you again, Mr. Shakespeare. I’m still loving my new title.

My poetry pal who knows nearly all the work in this manuscript—she and I worked together on how to organize our chapbooks a few years back— read through several line-ups to offer feedback on the construction of the whole book as well as each section. She looked at many elements, both macro and micro. She helped me iron out the wrinkles of the exact line-up of the poems. She even picked nits that made it possible to move poems from one section to another. Interestingly, the final structure allowed me to add back in a few poems that I didn’t think had a fit on my first pass through.

I can’t recommend highly enough the importance of having a willing, able, and honestly critical reader for the entire final piece. For me, her scrutiny and feedback made all the difference.

In the end, what all is said and done, when the pages are printed and, for now, in a file folder in the drawer, I have to say that the organizing process was actually fun. How often do any of us writers get to feel like a choreographer or an orchestra conductor?

That was what this process felt like. Slow-going and musical, flowing like a river or lava, at times tedious but, wow, what you end up with in the end. Something not nothing. How cool—and hot!—is that?