Sturgeon's Law

Steve:

I know it sounds corny, but I try to find a narrative arc in the poems I have in front of me, and after I order it so, consider some interesting side streets along the way.
 

I put them in so as to break up any potential monotony. Not too many of one type or length or theme or trigger word in a row, but there's a slow shift that does happen, from one focus to another.
 

got this help on my mfa manuscript via arielle greenberg:

first, i established that i had 5 sub-themes. i made 5 piles on the floor: (examples) love poems, new york poems, etc. then i took all my poems and divided them into one of those 5 categories. if one didn't fit (in any way) i set it aside. later, i'd really have to consider whether or not those poems were meant for THIS manuscript.

next, i'd order the manuscript by picking up one poem from each pile: 1234512345 etc. making sure i don't have poems that look the same on the page too close together (not 2 sonnets in a row, etc.) and paying special attention to the first few and last few. i also have a 6-poem series. that went smack in the middle.

i don't know. this seems really simplistic and - it is! but that is why it made so much sense to me. it also weaves the themes through the book which seems to make everything more cohesive.

just my 2 cents.
 

First, turn on "Let's Get Physical" by Olivia Newton John. This works best if you have it on CD, or on iPod and can just loop the song on indefinite repeat.

Second, go where the music takes you.
 

Steve, at the moment I'm going through the same process so I appreciate you bringing this up and registering the responses. Thanks!
 

I like the idea of the "narrative arc"...THIS leads to THAT sort of concept where one idea in a poem can flow into the next, but not in an overt sort of way. I re-read the script looking for that thread and trying to pair poems up in that way. If a poem just doesn't have a root then perhaps it has to sit this one out.
 

I tend to avoid the "narrative arc" approach, unless I've actually intended the poems as a narrative sequence.

Usually I try to order the poems to emphasize contrasting mood or feeling (psychological, emotional, etc.) from one poem to the next. I listen closely to how a poem ends, and to how the next poem begins, how one follows the other that way. Mood arc or feeling arc, rather than narrative arc. In this way (in theory anyway) the space in between the poems becomes part of the sequence.

Occasionally I've grouped three or four poems together because they've had some common theme or subject matter -- in a recent book, there are four poems I grouped that all came out of a visit to Oklahoma, for example.

In a couple of my books, I ordered the poems more or less in the sequence in which I wrote them, or finished them -- more or less, though I did change the original sequence in one or two places.

As I write poems, I tend to think of writing a cohesive manuscript, not just isolated poems. I normally have several manuscripts in progress at once, and when I write a poem, I'll usually have a strong sense of which of the manuscripts it belongs in. Occasionally I'll write one that doesn't seem to fit clearly, that's off on its own tangent, and that might become the beginning of a new manuscript.

A useful way I've found to practice ordering poems is to pick some poems by other poets that I like a lot -- maybe 12 or 15 poems by as many poets -- and pretend I'm editing an anthology. It's a way of practicing what to listen for, without having anything heavy invested in it emotionally (at least relatively speaking).
 

Well now this is a phone conversation.
 

Ewww, yes, Gina, a great phone conversation! LOL

Lyle, I'm curious...how you define the difference between the narrative arc and the mood/feeling arc. I think I'm stuck here. Maybe I'm defining wrong. What I do is read the poem and get a feeling or sense of what the poem is about (and I'm not talking theme, but more where it takes me). Then I see which poem might be the next brick on that road. Does that make sense?
 

I think about this a lot. My manuscript has gone through umpteen iterations, but in the end it always has three sections, each of which has a thematic resonance within (love poems, circus poems, childhood poems, the war series, the Medea sequence, etc.). One pet peeve that I nonetheless fall victim to--why are the childhood poems always at the front of the book? Even the pros do it (thinking, for example of, D. Nurske's "The Fall"). I'd love to find an organic way to incorporate childhood poems that doesn't use them to introduce me to the reader, but I've yet to find an order that does that and still feels right.
 

For those who do narrative arcs, do you ever feel like you're building something that someone can't enter halfway through, like a serialized TV show?
 

My poems only have a narrative arc from my frame of experience, so I don't believe I am being exclusionary. Unless the reader knows the entire story, because my poems are not narrative, the ordering still is not clear to them, I think