Counting Up Poems

Do I have enough poems for a manuscript?

Photo by Joyce McCown on Unsplash

As 2021, a year of intense drafting and revising, came to a close, I knew this was on the horizon: Taking inventory of all of the poems I’ve written over the last few years to see if a book is brewing. Friends, I dreaded it. I thought that I’d scrape through the files and find only a dozen poems with enough heft and polish for a manuscript. 

Happily, I was wrong. More on that in a moment.

When I teach manuscript development, one of the first questions I get is, “How do I know when I have enough poems for a manuscript?” There are at least three ways to answer that question.

First, the numbers.

Generally, full-length poetry collections in final book form are between 60-100 pages. But many poems that fit on an 8x11 doc will span multiple pages in book layout. Publishers generally require manuscript submissions between 50-80 typed pages. 

I discovered I have 106 poems. Wow. Of course, not all 106 will be contenders for a manuscript, but I was pleased.

My ballpark is 35–45 poems. If you write shorter poems, you may need to increase that number. For perspective, my first book Bloodline contained just 28 poems and was 74 pages total. A handful were section poems that spanned multiple pages. I don't have as many section poems in the mix right now, so I'll probably need more total poems to fill out the manuscript.

Second, the quality.

How many of the 106 are worth including in a manuscript? To get a sense, I sorted poems into four folders: finalized, high-priority revision, low-priority revision, and to cut. 

To decide in which folder a poem belonged, I gauged how it currently “lives” in the world. Some have been published in literary journals; these are finalized. Some have received positive responses from peers and mentors to the extent that I consider them finalized or for high-priority revision. Others haven’t been developed enough or have lost their zing for me along the way. (No big deal. I never throw anything out, and I may need to steal from those duds to finish other poems in the manuscript. So they stay, for now.)

All sorted, I had 28 finalized and 45 in the high-priority revision folder—a total of 73 strong contenders. Of the 45 in high-priority revision, I estimate about half are very close to done and/or of high relevance to themes in the manuscript. Which brings me to …

Third, the cohesiveness.

It’s important, even at this early stage, to assess how many of the poems belong together—how many have a synergistic quality that will create cohesion in a manuscript.

Cohesiveness is complex—a topic I’ll circle back to in future newsletters. For now, suffice it to say we’re talking about a baseline for the manuscript’s thematic content. (Note: It’s likely you’ve written multiple poems on certain topics, but that isn’t the same as theme. More on that later.) 

Not all poems that I am considering for the book need to be “on theme,” but I’m aware that related (resonant) poems will act like guides, leading the reader thoughtfully through the book’s territory.

For now, I encourage you to trust emerging patterns. 

I suspected that the poems would be thematic even before I went through this exercise. But it was truly heartening to see them all in one place. Like putting yeast and warm water and flour in a bowl, seeing the titles together catalyzes something in the poetic subconscious. 

Inspired to do a poem inventory? Have a different method? Share your experience in the comments!

Happy writing,

Radha