Does anyone have any tips on moving from poetry pamphlet collection to a full-length collection?
I said in an earlier post that I'm ready to put my post-Vintage Sea poems behind me and start working towards / focusing on a full-length collection. I feel so ready to work on something bigger than a group of random poems. But working out what theme/subject-matter I want to focus on and how to approach the bigger project of a full-length collection is a different thing entirely! So any experience or wisdom that could enlighten me at all would be much appreciated!
13 comments:
for me, i'm of the opinion that you most likely know what your themes ets are. so just write more of them. so long as they feel right emotionally the reader will do the rest
i aim to have between 70 and 90 poems per collection (dependent on length). once that's done it gives an editor space to whittle them down or have a general fiddle.
then the problem is, of course, to get someone to publish them. as yet i've not solved that one!
for me, i'm of the opinion that you most likely know what your themes ets are. so just write more of them. so long as they feel right emotionally the reader will do the rest
i aim to have between 70 and 90 poems per collection (dependent on length). once that's done it gives an editor space to whittle them down or have a general fiddle.
then the problem is, of course, to get someone to publish them. as yet i've not solved that one!
Well it took me forty years to get round to bringing out a full collection so I’m probably not the best person to offer advice here but I have an opinion or two. I’ve been telling everyone of late about Kathleen Jaimie’s article in The Guardian. One of the things she says is, “It seems to me that if you know precisely what you've done, or are going to do, then it's a project. Projects are not art. Art proceeds without a map.” She also talks about taking time after finishing one book to allow a “new self” to grow. She’s talking more about novels but I see this as applying to poetry too. When I look through my big red folder it falls into natural sections when it’s obvious that certain issues (or people) were preoccupying me. After a while I’d lose interest or have said everything I had to say and I’d move onto something else. I get the feeling, reading in between the lines, that you’re in a bit of a no man’s land at the moment, feeling you ought to be working on, to use Jaimie’s word, a “project” but not being especially drawn to anything. I’m in much the same predicament but not with my poetry. I’ve always treated my poetry as pure writing. And by that I mean it comes when it comes and is what it is. Only after writing the damn stuff for forty years can I see a bigger picture and I guess that’s why I had to wait until I had sufficient poems to pick from to see the thread that ran through them. There are others. I would like to do an Ars Poetica at some time. I like poems about poems and probably have enough for a chapbook. I’ve no idea why some people sniff at them.
When I first started looking at my poems seriously I thought of breaking the collection into three parts—‘Love’, ‘Sex’ and ‘Death’—but, again, I woulnd’t’ve been writing anything new; I would’ve been picking from what already existed. I do like diptychs and triptychs. I see no reason why you couldn’t break a full collection into two or three contrasting (or complementary) sections. I am against setting out to write a collection but then I’m not that kind of poet. I did do it with my short story collection which is based on the senses. I started with the five physical senses and then wondered where one might go from there. Sense of humour? Sense of justice? You could take the fruits of the spirit as a starting point (the seven deadly sins have been done to death) or what about the forty-eight emotions?
You mentioned all the poems you have that reference blood in some way. Perhaps this is a subject you could research. There is a huge mythology around blood (and not just vampires) and the Bible is full of references to it. If you have a concordance see what you can find. There are some online ones available too.
This will only work if you find a subject that you care about enough to devote several years to it which is why I’m struggling getting a foothold on my next novel. I have a start (some 4000 words) but I’m not passionate about what I’ve written or where it’s heading and I can’t do it if it’s just writing another book because it’s expected of me. There are plenty of authors out there who never wrote more than five novels in their lives.
hi swiss, I know my subconscious knows what I want to be writing, just wish I had a jungian psychoanalyst to bring it to the fore :)
hi jim, I agree with your Kathleen Jamie quote, in fact I never know where a poem is going to end up when I start writing one. it's not that I feel I ought to be working on something but don't know what, it really is that weird heavy feeling at the back of my mind of something big and ready to be tapped into but I don't know yet how to access it. does that make sense? I've never felt as ready as I do now to tackle something on a bigger scale, I was thinking last night that maybe I need to find a rhythm to latch onto that could facilitate / draw the poems out.
I've probably decided not to put together a full length collection so not the best advisor but good luck!
thanks Juliet :)
i think i agree with everything that jim said except possibly the kathleen jamie quote above. i think the notion that art hasn't got a map is nice enough in essence but really just self deception. wasn't it borges who talked about maps being self reflexive?
that said, i don't much like writing to a theme even if i know there are themes or at least subject trends i tend towards. so i've a few things that are most of the way done, others that are smaller pamphlet sized and a big wadge of stuff that doesn't readily fit into anything!
i did sort of like what kathleen jamie had to say about demolishing the workshop. i'm lucky enough to have the quick writing gene but equally, if that's getting a bit tiresome i can switch into doing something else whether that's painting or whatever.
mostly tho, for me, it's the work that's important. it's an audience of one approach to be sure but at least it stops all the externals messing woth your head!
how I'm interpreting Jamie is, if you know exactly where you're going with a poem / collection / piece of writing then what's the point in doing it, which ties in with the Kunitz quote at the side of my blog. for me, the essential part of writing is what the poem brings to the fore, the self-revelation and surprise, that's the exciting thing about it. I don't think we are disagreeing here!
Marion, even thinking about such a thing boggles my mind, so I am of no use whatsoever to you!
I do think, however, that you should hold hard to the nebulous desire to do such a thing, because it is only through such desire that you will ever achieve it.
no, i definitely agree with that. if i met someone who claimed to know precisely what they were doing i wouldn't believe them!
thanks titus, good point, I shall remember that :)
me either, though it takes / took me a long time to realise that no one really knows exactly what they're doing! :)
I've come in on this rather late, but just to say that having JUST had my first chapbook published, and feeling (after several decades of writing) that it is my springboard to the 'next thing' (possibly/probably a full length collection), I have found all this discussion very helpful and thought-provoking. I would feel inclined to pay careful heed to Kathleen Jamie's words. There is a sense in which each poem surprises its author (or perhaps should) ... but I guess there has to be some kind of 'reining in' when it comes to collating a collection, by the very nature of the exercise; but that's not to say that the final groupings and juxtapostions won't spawn surprises for us (and hopefully for readers, too!).
hi Caroline, thanks for that and congrats on your chapbook! that's the thing, to keep writing poems that surprise us and (hopefully) take us somewhere new!
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