I spent
much of today taping poems to the walls of my little office. It’s the kind of
thing that you do when you’re in possession of two chief requirements: a book
manuscript that is going nowhere and at least four blank walls painted a grim,
institutional hue.
My book
manuscript has been making the rounds for a while now without catching an
editor’s eye, with one exception. I recently switched some things around and
added some new work, to good effect—I’m currently a finalist in a book contest
with the slightly revised version.
The way I
see it, if a few small additions and deletions of poems can make me a finalist,
well, then overhauling that sucker will surely result in a book. And a prize.
Great reviews. A National Book Award or Pulitzer or two ....
But I
digress. The manuscript is older than my artistic vision, and it’s time for
more of the sorts of changes that seemed to help it a bit in the contest I
mentioned. And just like Andie (the Mollie Ringwald character) in Pretty in Pink, you need to do something
that’s just right for you with the material you have, even if it requires
getting out the seam ripper and the pinking shears and going to town on the
original.
(I’m sorry.
I can’t let the reference to the Pretty
in Pink dress go by without mentioning how incredibly ugly Andie’s finished
product actually was—like a cross between a mother-of-the-bride dress and a
toilet paper roll. It is, quite simply, one of the worst dresses I have ever
seen. One of the benefits of blogging is that you may bring everything to a
grinding halt so that you can offer a strong opinion about a twenty-nine-year-old
movie.)
Allow me to
return to my manuscript, which is now thoroughly deconstructed and lining every
inch of the walls of a small office. I even maximized space by taping poems
into a bookcase, on sides, back, bottom, and underside of each visible shelf.
The result
of my effort is that I can sit in my chair and steeple my fingers under my chin
like a don—love poems to the left of me, mom poems to the right, body poems
behind me, uncategorized work out in front. The ceiling is bare. I’m not out of
poems; I just don’t have a ladder to put them there, much as I’d like to lie on
the floor and mentally rearrange them.
In a
previous post, I recommended poetry projects—that is, I recommended that busy
writers have an ongoing topic or exercise so that they can cut out the time
they might otherwise spend wondering what to write about. While this plan is
effective for time saving, and is artistically energizing, my mess of a
manuscript reveals a flaw in the idea. The reason my poems won’t fall into a
tidy line is that when I look at them, I don’t see a book—I see a dozen
chapbooks and a bunch of strays.
I suspect
that the problem isn’t the poems. After all, they spring from the same
consciousness; they reveal my idiosyncratic rhetoric and lineation and imagery
and form. I feel as though one could pick any two from the walls or the
remaining stack (ceiling material!) and recognize that the same woman wrote
them. (That could also be the problem—that woman, bless her heart, may not be
any good! But that’s an issue for another day.) The poems work together, and
each one shores up the efforts of the others.
When it
comes time to make a book, I realize that I may be locked within a
project-driven mindset, and I have a hard time sticking several sets of poems
together. While I appreciate my imagination—quirky and flexible and vivid—in
the composition of the poems, my vision totally fails when I try to use it to
find a path through my own book.
The
imagination that is willing to get into the kind of trouble that yields a poem is
lodged in a mind that struggles to bring order from chaos. I am not the first
poet to feel flummoxed by the organizational aspect of the publishing task. And
when I look across my messy home desk, positioned in a chaotic room of a
disorganized house, this is especially clear.
This is
really just a long way of inviting you to my office. Tucked away in a deserted
corner of an academic building, it’s a good place to sit and think. And if you
have a moment, could you eyeball the poems all around you, maybe shift a few
from one wall to another?
There’s a
roll of tape in the drawer. Please turn out the lights when you leave.
