While waiting for notes on my novel, I’m working on ordering a new poetry book. This process is intuitive. I’m not someone who believes in arc. I don’t even know what that word means in the context of poetry, but I’ve heard people use it and think it’s bullshit. This isn’t to say I don’t work conceptually or with purpose. I have a series of hotel poems in this new book, like the car poems or the deadly sins poems in the last one. What that tells me, practically, is that they will likely occupy their own section. But hardly anything more.
One of the great things a poem does is reveal your own thinking to you. I’m rarely aware of that thinking. Which is why a successful poem sometimes contains an element of surprise. Putting a book together is similar, though harder. The first thing I do is look at all the poems I’ve written. This is usually a range between 60 and 100. Then I cut the B poems immediately. I don’t find those even worth saving. But it takes time to recognize them. (What about the C poems or the D poems you might ask? Those get aborted and abandoned mid writing / right away. There are a lot of them.)
I can never write when I’m drinking but reading over drafts of poems on one to two drinks is helpful. I can instantly see the bullshit or lack of precision. I can see those things sober too but two drinks bring out a very harsh inner critic. I’ll often have a glass of wine and just start reading. The thing about this methodology is, I can recognize why something is bad but I cannot fix it. And that’s good, because the exercise is meant to excise.
After this I’m probably left with 35-60 poems. This gets difficult. Because in these remaining poems are As, A-s, and B+s. The goal now is to get rid of the B+s, hard as they are to identify, and only spend energy on the right A-s (trying to get them to As). Who the fuck knows how this happens. I just start and go with it.
The B+s are usually competent poems but not entirely serving of the book’s vision. How do you find a book’s vision? Having a title helps. Identifying a crisis (aesthetic, moral, personal, etc) also helps. A book often contains more than one crisis. And it’s not entirely logical or discernible as it may be in fiction.
On the opposite end is the question of: what is the book trying to build. It can’t just be crisis for me. Sometimes the building is easy. A resolution to said crisis, for example. But that’s not enough in my eyes. There has to be an addition—something additive—which stands a part from the crisis.
One reason I almost didn’t make this post is because talk about this gets abstract. And sort of stupid. The truth is, you go on your nerve which is your talent. If that fails you, tough luck. Not much you can do but start over.
The A- poems are the most infuriating because they usually need a new line or a new ending or a new beginning and all of those things are so major. The most major really. A book is as good as every single line of every single poem. For me, if there is one bad line, if there is one bad poem, I might as well not have tried to make a book. The stakes have to be high. Otherwise, why publish it? I only want to produce poems I love. I only want my readers to read poems I love. This requires a lot of the word “no.” No is a more creative vibe than yes, to me.
After doing this kind of stupid work, and I say that because it sort of bores me, there comes a really exciting point where you identify poems you want to write and add to the book, in service of its vision. This is when I’m actually beginning to understand what the book wants to say or is trying to say. I’m sort of meeting it for the first time because I’m beginning to write poems for it, not just taking poems I wrote in the dark.
And for me almost every poem is written in the dark, which is to say, I write a poem for the poem’s sake (for the soul’s sake, not to sound fucking crazy but, whatever). I’m not thinking it’s going to be in a book. But these late poems, when you start to figure out what the book is, they’re quite exciting. You can’t get too into them though, or the book becomes a walking project. This is why political poetry is so poor. It often feels like a lesson someone is trying to teach you or a point someone is trying to make. I never want a book to feel that way, so when I’m in this sweet spot of writing new poems to enlarge or complete a book’s vision, I try not to get carried away and still walk with intuition, not certainty or a didactic aim. Because this is difficult, it is exciting and rewarding.
There’s a lot of play involved too. I always try to remember that a reader hardly ever reads a poetry book chronologically. They skip around. But what they may notice is a poem next to another one. How two poems speak to each other. How one section feels different from another. A reader sort of realizes it’s a book the same time I do. After reading a bunch of poems from different places in the book. Then they get the temperature of the water. Which is really what I try to aim for: different temperatures but the feeling that they’re in the same lake. The water at the bottom is usually colder than the water on the surface. Have you noticed?
It’s also like cooking maybe. But I don’t cook. So why would I say this? I don’t know. One time I cooked with my friend Charlotte in Bedford, New York and I kept telling her it felt so creative. I called it creative cooking. But maybe because I was drunk through most of it and just throwing whatever felt right in. Who cares. It tasted great though.
If you have a spiritual or religious practice, that also comes into play when putting a book together. You want a sense of wholeness. Where have you felt a sense of wholeness before? If you haven’t, where have you read about it, thought about it, mused on it, etc. For me, it’s a spiritual matter. Like Britney Spears once said in the back of a New York cab, “all this stuff goes away, and it’s just yourself and your soul that you have to deal with.”
I don’t want to look at even one poem in my books and regret it. It better be speaking to some part of my soul’s purpose. Even if I don’t feel that way retrospectively, you have to put the stakes there at the moment of creation. Otherwise you might as well become a lawyer. Law is not spiritual work. All to the good. The world has to run somehow. But I don’t write poems to make the world run. It feels bigger than that, which sounds stupid, but because it feels bigger than that (to me), I take it very seriously.
And when a book is in production, and you think you have it all figured out, you wake up one day and write something new and think, God, that just adds something that wasn’t there, can I put that in? And you realize how flimsy this whole project is. But what holds it together is faith. Which is always a crisis, and a building for me. Let’s hope I can do it again. I’m not one of those people that thinks having put one book together makes another easier. But that’s because all of my books are so different. I’ll do anything to escape boredom. That requires invention. And reinvention, as well.
'The truth is, you go on your nerve which is your talent.'
"It’s also like cooking maybe. But I don’t cook. So why would I say this?"
Because you're an artist, not a craftsman