A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And-Thirteen

I want to take a little bit more time to consider the idea of revision through curation, as I was discussing yesterday.  This is something that is quite complicated, and I think the first step is in discussing some of the questions around creating a larger work of poetry from individual pieces.  At times, this is a self-described process, as when the work is narratively or thematically connected, or from a particular speaker or set of speakers.  A great many wonderful books of poetry are born from this kind of impulse, and I can think of some poets whose entire careers seem to move across such works, with each book representing a particular poetic project they had undertaken.  I see this as a valuable way to approach the poetry, and I can imagine how it can be a result of curating a larger body of work, discovering the pieces that share a certain theme or voice, or which meditate on a single event or set of events.  As I have said, I often find myself writing around and through the same things for a period, and the potential for such a work emerging is not outside of the realm of possibility.  Nor is the idea of my choosing to focus on a specific larger corpus while writing.  I have ideas that I think would work best through connected poems, and I know that, at some point, when those ideas are clear, I will likely embrace that type of path in order to do that work.  

At the same time, it is also true that many, if not most, books of poetry are made from the work that a poet has done over a period, and not necessarily as a singular effort, or with an eye towards how they will be collected together.  This, to me, is the place where I am most interested at present, as it matches the work that I have right now.  In many ways, the challenge of such work is creating a sense of structure, of the book having an arch to it that pulls the reader along.  Their needs to be a sense, I think, that the pieces offer insight into one another, and a sense that the work, while individual, is also existing in a collaborative relationship with other pieces in the book.  It is a matter of permeability between the pieces, of themes and ideas that carry across the work in transformative ways.

In a sense, I do think of this as a narrative, but as a concept, not a literal.  There are not going to be characters passing through or a plot, but there is the journey I am on with the reader, and that involves many of the same elements as a classic story structure, for me.  By considering it as a single journey, not as individual pieces that exist along, I am able to see the themes and concepts that I want to build around.  For example, I may have a number of poems that deal with a similar concept and which can be placed to show a progression of thought about that subject.  It may be that I have other poems that connect to each of these individual pieces in some way or other, through a thematic link or even just in imagery.  These poems were not intended to be connected, most of the time, but it is impossible not to have these kinds of repetitions and reflections in the work.  The point is to see them, and to think of how they can be used to create a progression, a movement. 

The act of revision, then, becomes about shaping the work within a context.  The other work provides a background for seeing the piece with greater clarity, and the revision becomes a process of refining the qualities that make it work in context.  The result is not only the individual poem getting better, but also a more cohesive body of work, a piece that has power beyond the poem itself, because the work was seen as a whole in a deep and honest way.  To me, this is not only about creating a single collection, though, but about the larger question of how my work as a whole exists together.  I do not see how I could work through all my poems in this way, at least not as a single effort, but I also recognize that this is a process which can be scaled.  Two poems can be looked at together in this way, or twenty, or a hundred, and even more, groupings can be made that work individually and are then connected together with other pieces, through the same general process but on a larger level, to create a work that stands as a whole and as a series of parts.  

At present, to be practical, I think this is going to be something I explore in relationship to the packets I am creating.  I think that the poems in a packet can be looked at as a small collection, and it makes sense to send poems that are, in some sense, similar to an editor( though I can make an equal argument for the opposite approach).  Even if I do pick poems to send which are not all connected in a direct way, it is certain that they will share things just because of the reality that I wrote each one.  It may be I find that I am wrong in this, but I think it is an approach worth considering.  If it does not seem to be helpful in this way, I can always just save this approach for working on a collection and find better tools for individual revisions, but I know that it helped me to create a manuscript I am truly proud of, work that I think represented a new level for me in what I am doing as a writer, and which I am optimistic will be accepted for publication at some time soon.