A Case for Writing Poetry Books

If we just write good poems, will the books we want appear?

Galileo’s drawing of the Pleiades constellation.

Do you see yourself as a poetry book writer or as a writer who works on individual poems and happens to put them into books?

In your education as a poet, were you told (explicitly or not) any of the following?

• Just focus on writing poems, on writing them well

• Produce poems without thinking of them as a book

• Experiment endlessly! That’s how you find/develop/push your voice

• If you commit to a theme or subject matter, it will constrain you and result in dull poems 

• A book of poems is something to consider only after you’ve “done the work,” after some unknowable future point

This is the scant poetry book-writing advice I encountered along the way to an award-winning book. It not only failed to help bring the book to fruition, it impeded my process. It took a lot longer to create the book than it should have.

It’s tricky, because there’s a shard of truth in each of these. In my experience, this do-not-write-books-write-poems approach eventually fails us. They might be really helpful during an apprentice stage, but too many of us keep following this advice indefinitely.

I’ll say more about this in a minute, but first a digression …

The constellations

My husband and I recently made a trip out to the San Rafael Swell in Utah. Formed by a bulge under the Earth’s crust and millions of years of erosion, the area’s “reef” is a hummocky maze of slot canyons. Magnificent cliffs reveal layers of stone created by seas, by lakes, by wind. Petrified wood pieces in the arroyos hint at bygone forests. 

We pitched our tent deep in the Swell, on a high mesa with a long, long view. As soon as the sun set, stars and planets appeared. Away from light-polluted skies, Jupiter looked like the giant orb that it is, not a weakly glowing dot. Saturn showed up in Capricorn. And then the legs and backwards bow of Sagittarius appeared in the Milky Way. It was awe inspiring, to say the least. 

All night the constellation Draco slid over us. I watched through the tent’s mesh, waking every hour or so to a new position of the constellation. I felt inexpressibly tiny and brief in the scope of time, yet connected. It was clarifying. 

What does this have to do with writing poetry books? I’ll explain.

Seeing patterns, not just stars

We are a pattern-finding, constellation-making species. A constellation of poems is one way we might describe a poetry book. Like constellations, our poems typically appear in a specific area of experience where we have placed our attention. In a book, like in a constellation, the space between elements becomes meaningful, too.

Writing a book is a natural extension of our human curiosity and meaning-making capacities.

Poets are especially concerned with connections — how events today correlate with others, how the insects I saw rising over a pool in the canyon would nourish the tiny birds we saw flitting in the bushes, and how those two images together gave me a sliver of hope.

So why not lean in and say “I am writing a book of poems”? Why not see yourself as the discoverer of magnificent patterns that are expressed in whole books? What makes that so risky? 

False beliefs

It’s true that if we write a lot of poems over a relatively short period of time (a few years), themes and connections will appear naturally. Permission to play without constraint is always the first part of the process. But the advice to keep iterating until … when? … rests on a false belief that writing toward a book will harm our commitment to honing individual poems. 

In my own experience, and in teaching manuscript development and working with book mentees, envisioning the book as a whole before the individual works are 100% “done” only sharpens focus on crafting poems that meet the very high standards we set for ourselves.

It’s true: A book vision is no substitute for finessing individual poems. However, at a certain point, not seeing ourselves as orchestrators of larger-scale works is a problem. It limits the potential of our work. 

Permission to envision your book

The literary world is no meritocracy. Like in most paradigms these days, we create in a system that would keep us churning, insecure, and needing help. It’s no wonder we rarely receive permission to have a broader vision for our work.

Please don’t squash your desire to write a book of poems because you’ve been told to divert your desire into smaller works, or because you’ve been taught indirectly by gate-keepy literary culture to downplay your vision. 

What is the best/worst advice you’ve been given about writing a book of poems? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Free Classes in November

Do you have a stack of poems just waiting to be organized into a beautiful book? Or a manuscript that’s halfway there but needs … something? Learn the essential steps to creating a standout poetry manuscript in this free masterclass miniseries. Know where to start, what to do next, and when to start submitting.

This poetry manuscript masterclass mini series is for poets in any stage of creating a manuscript. Join for one class or for all three. 

• November 5: Anatomy of a Standout Poetry Manuscript

• November 12: How to Sequence Poems

• November 19: Common Mistakes—and How to Avoid Them

All classes take place on Zoom from 9-10am MT (8-9 PT, 10-11 CT, 11-12 ET)