Honing Poems, Poetry Books: A Publisher's Perspective

"Publishing a book with a small press is a collaborative process" — Poet and Terrapin Books founder Diane Lockward on manuscript dos and don'ts, plus how to find the right publisher

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing poet, editor, and publisher/founder of Terrapin Books, Diane Lockward, about The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft, plus her thoughts on poetry manuscript development, how to organize poems, and finding the right publisher. 

Diane Lockward is the editor of The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft and three earlier craft books: The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics (Terrapin Books, 2018), The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop (Terrapin Books, 2016), and The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop (Terrapin Books, rev. ed., 2016). She is also the author of four poetry books, most recently The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement (Wind Publications, 2016). Her awards include the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Woman of Achievement Award. Her poems have been included in such journals as the Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry. She is the founder and publisher of Terrapin Books.

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview in text.

A Publisher’s Insights on Honing Poems, Building Poetry Books

Radha Marcum: Diane, what inspired you to start creating books on the craft of poetry? And, specifically, what spurred your latest book on craft?

Diane Lockward: They’ve all evolved out of a poetry newsletter that I started probably a dozen or more years ago. It started with about 100 subscribers, and then it grew to over 1,000 subscribers. And in that newsletter, I always put a model poem, and I do discussion analysis of the poem, focusing on the elements of craft. And then I create a poetry prompt based on the skills that are in the model poem. 

After a couple of years, I was accumulating quite a bit of material, and I got the idea to put a book together. I broached the subject to my at-the-time publisher, and he was game. So I put it together. And that became the original book. 

One of my goals then, and with each of the craft books, was to present a book geared towards experienced poets. It seemed to me that there were so many on the market for beginning poets, but really not much out there for poets who are already somewhat knowledgeable about the craft, and already practicing it. I was filling a niche market that was sort of wide open. 

I kept doing the monthly newsletter, and accumulating more material. Eventually, I decided to do a second one. At that point, though, my publisher had gone out of business. So I was confronted with the decision, do I want to spend two or three years looking for a publisher of this book? Or do I want to do it myself? Now, I would never have been and would not be interested in publishing self publishing a book of my own poems, but I felt OK about investigating that possibility for a craft book. So I looked into it. And I discovered that there was so much work involved in getting it published, that I might as well realize another dream that I had for a number of years, which was to start my own small press for poetry books. So that became Terrapin books. 

After publishing The Crafty Poet Two, I put out a call for submissions of regular poetry books, and it just kept growing and growing. I thought that that second craft book would be my last craft book. But I kept doing the newsletter each month, and I kept accumulating more and more material and that turned into a third book and then a fourth. Each of those jump off of the preceding books, so that they work together, you can go from one to the next to the other, but they'll also they stand on their own.

Radha: It sounds like a very organic process. And yet, to riff on your title, also “strategic,” which is a wonderful combination. What do you hope poets will get out of the book? What do those exercises provide for poets who have been practicing for a number of years?

Diane: It begins with a model poem by a reasonably well known poet. And the poems that I choose for the newsletter and subsequently for the book in progress, all have something distinctive about the use of craft, I might admire, the way the metaphors are used, or the way repetition is used, or the variations with punctuation, or it might even be a form that I wasn't familiar with, that I'd like to expose my readers to. Or it might be a traditional form, like a sonnet. But the poet has done something revolutionary with it. 

I picked them because they stand out for some reason. And then in the discussion, I talk about a little bit what the poem is about, and how the craft elements come into play. And I focus on the distinctive craft poem, elements in this particular poem. And then as I said, Before, I create the prompt the follow up prompt, based on those craft elements, I want the poet to practice those craft elements. 

Radha: The practice of poetry, of revision, and honing the craft is a big part of the process of putting together a manuscript and a book of poems. As somebody who has a lot of experience in that arena, what's your approach to revision? Do you have advice on how to approach that that important part of manuscript development? 

Diane: When I want to put a book together, I'm bringing together pieces that have been produced over the past three or four years. And so I need to do some coordinating, I need to get some stylistic consistency from one chapter of the book to the next. So there's a lot of going through honing the pieces that I want to put in the book. And then with the prompts, also, I want them to be approximately equal in length. So I might have to add a little bit to one and take away a little bit of from another. 

The other huge part is organizing. That was huge, especially with the first book, I printed it all out, put it in little paperclip piles, and just made a big pile on my kitchen table, and just sat there and stared at it for days and days. What am I going to do with this? Eventually, I began to break down that big pile into smaller piles. And then I stared at those for a very long time, and started rearranging them. Now that's not good over there. But maybe it'll work over here. And trying to get the organizational structure of the book, what would be the organizing principles or concepts. 

Eventually, I did come up with I think 10 or 12 different sections, and then dealt out the different pieces into those sections and tried to make them cohere. The subsequent books were much easier to organize having done at once. With the most recent book, I had a structural plan already in mind. I knew I was going to go by craft elements. Even as I was doing newsletters over the past year or two, I started organizing those newsletters towards the eventual book, I was finally catching on to how to do this.

Radha: Putting together a book of poetry, do you go through a similar process where you have piles of poems, etc.? I'm curious if there's a correlation to poetry books? 

Diane: It’s not a dissimilar process. With the book of poems, you start with your 50 to 60 poems, looking at how to put them together. And then you start to ask, What's the controlling idea? Why do these poems belong together in a single book? You don't want just a bunch of poems. You want them all to be of a piece. Each one has to be part of something larger. I forget who said that if you have 25 poems in a book, the book itself is the 26th poem. Everything has to hold together. 

When I'm reading submissions of manuscripts as a publisher, that's something that I look for: Do these poems belong together? Or are they just tossed together? So when revising a manuscript of poems, I always would start with the poems, and then I would go through them and make notes on motifs. Then I'd start to organize the big pile into smaller piles. 

I've seen a lot of poets post pictures on Facebook of their process, they go away to a residency or they take a room in their house and they put up a clothesline and start clipping different groups of poems together. And by the time the residency is finished, they've got an idea and got it put together. 

I can tell when I'm reading manuscripts that some poets haven't given too much thought that a well organized manuscript presents itself rather early as being that and then there are others that have a lot of good poems, but there's really no coherence to the manuscript itself. So the process between putting a craft book together and putting a book of poems together is really somewhat similar.

Radha:  I appreciate what you’re suggesting. I might even say it's rather more straightforward than a lot of us have been led to believe. A lot of the the students who I am in touch with feel that there's some mysterious thing that will come about in the process. But, even if not standard process, there is at least a pretty straightforward approach that one can take to create a manuscript that is coherent and feels all of one piece. I appreciate you suggesting the practicality of that process.

Diane: You need some organizational skills. It's not the creative part of the writing. But it's an essential part of putting a book together. And I hear over and over and over again, "The thing that I can't do is put the manuscript together. I'm no good at organizing the poems. I don't know how to put them together." Well, just sit down and go through and take notes on what are the main ideas in each of the poems and you'll start to see some common links among the poems, and then you deal with them out like a deck of cards. In the third craft book, The Practicing Poet, I have a section on manuscript organization, because I felt that there was a need for that.

Radha: It does seem like there's a gap in the public conversation around poetry book development. I really appreciate your thoughts on the making of the book. Tell us a little bit more about your journey with Terrapin.

Diane: I started it in 2015. So it's been going now for seven years, which just seems amazing to me. Now, I have published close to 50 titles, three anthologies, and the four craft books. So it's getting fairly substantial. 

I came up with the name Terrapin because I like the tortoise shell, that each one is different. They all have such beautiful design. Do you think a turtle is ugly? But if you look at that shell, they're really pretty exquisite. Then I had to decide who to use for my publishing printing service. And then there are a lot of practical things you have to do to open a business. 

If I didn't know something, I would ask somebody. Glass Lyre Press was very helpful. Jeffrey Levine at Tupelo was very helpful. Kelly Russell Agadon at Two Sylvias Press was very helpful to me. And I got a lot of the practical stuff from them. Kelly told me what software program I should use for cover design. I'm still using it seven years later. I found out the hardest thing for me was figuring out how to format a book. I needed a state ID. I needed a federal identification number. Fortunately, I was able to get all that stuff online. 

I decided to do an anthology first, rather than open submissions for individual collections. I thought it would be a good one to get a lot of poets involved. And it would give me good experience in putting a project together. Once I put out the call for submissions, I was just astounded by how many submissions I got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. 

After I had that book put together then I figured, well, I'm ready now to put up put out my first call for submissions of poetry manuscripts by individual poets. And again, I was shocked because I got quite a few submissions from poets who knew what they were doing. Of course, I got a lot and they still do get some from poets who are just sending out for the first time haven't investigated the press. They haven't really done their homework, but back then, because I was brand new, they thought that I would be willing to take just about everything. I wasn't. I didn't have to because I got wonderful submissions.One of my early submissions came from poet Lynn Knight, who's an absolutely fantastic poet, and has numerous books out with different publishers, and as won all kinds of prizes. 

I've now done, I think, 16 different submission periods. I usually take two to four submissions of manuscripts each time.

Radha: I want to pause there and acknowledge what a tremendous amount of work goes on behind the scenes of a press. I think most poets aren't aware of everything that needs to be in place in order for a publisher to exist and produce books, from gathering the submissions, to formatting books, proofreading, and so forth. There's a beautiful book at the end of that long process, but there's a tremendous amount of work that goes on behind the scenes.

Diane: It's work I love. I always say, I invented the job that I really wanted. I taught high school English for quite a few years. And I loved that also. But after a number of years, I was ready to move on to something else. I was writing poetry at that point. And I wanted to spend the years ahead, invested in my poetry life. I never thought at that time that I would end up as a publisher of poetry books, but it evolved out of that. 

But it is it is a lot of work. It is a commitment. After the book is published, you have an obligation to PR it a bit, work to get it into the hands of readers. I like to do that. I ask my posts to have a website. I make flyers for them, press releases. I ask them to get readings and go out and do them. 

Publishing a book with a small press is a collaborative process. You have to work together. If the poet doesn't want to work the publisher, it's not going to work out. If the publisher doesn't want to work with the poet, it's not going to work out. It's a lot of give and take and a lot of back and forth. I think one of the benefits of working with a small press publisher is that you get more of a personal relationship than you might with one of the big houses. 

Radha: Right. Acceptance of the manuscript is not the end of the story. As you said, it's very much a partnership between the poet and the publisher. That’s why it’s important for poets to have done their homework about the press, understanding the partnership aspect going into it. It's important to find the right fit. I feel fortunate that to have worked with an incredibly dedicated publisher for my first book. Andrea Watson at 3: A Taos Press has been wonderful to work with in that way. But I did a lot of homework to find the press. I wanted a publisher whose work more widely I felt I could champion—not just myself, but also the other poets published by the press. It is a community of sorts.

Diane: You had done your homework to find the right publisher for you. That's essential. Too many poets just send their manuscripts out willy nilly without paying any attention, or asking is this going to be a good fit for me? Do I want my book published by this press? Have you ever looked at a book from that press to make sure that they're doing the kind of work that you would be proud to have representing the kind of book that you want to have done? 

Do they design covers that you admire? Do they put print on the spine, there's some presses now that don't do a printed spine. If that matters to you, you wouldn't want to submit to that press. If you don't like the smaller size books that some presses use, then don't submit to a press that uses the smaller size books. 

If you love French flaps, Tupelo is a great choice. But if you hate French flaps for some reason, then maybe you wouldn't want to go there. It really makes sense to be choosy. Especially financially these days when it can be so expensive to submit to these presses, $25 to $30 for a submission. One thing that I have prided myself on: I determined early on was that I was not going to ask an exorbitant submission rate. So I started at $12. And I'm still at $12.

Radha: What advice do you have for poets who are in the submission process, in terms of the manuscript itself? What blind spots or mistakes do you see that poets could fix or pay greater attention to before they submit?

Diane: One of the most common tendencies I see is a tendency to want to put together all related poems. So if you have six dog poems, you put together all the six poems together, whereas it would be much more interesting to find those dog poems scattered throughout the manuscript. So you read a dog poem, and then you read a tree poem, and down the road somewhere, Oh, here's another dog poem, how delightful. It comes as a nice surprise, but a familiar kind of surprise. 

You might start with a pile of dog poems, a pile of tree poems, a pile of poems about bodies of water, and you might have a pile of poems about your mother's death. When you get done with those five piles, distribute them into five new piles. So one dog poem here, one dog poem there, and so on, like a deck of cards. And then within each of those newly created sections, start seeing how those poems fit together on nicely. Avoid putting clusters of poems together. Think of it like a braid with a number of different strands and you are weaving them together into a new pattern.

Radha: Poets that I've worked with have also tended to use a chronological strategy. We're so used to a storytelling approach, but a poetry collection is usually not a story. 

Diane: That’s definitely true. Another very common structural device that I see is to go by the seasons. I can't tell you how many manuscripts I've had submitted, that are summer, fall, winter, spring, or some rearrangement of that! I'm getting 10 manuscript submissions per submission period using that structure. It's been way overused. Shake that up a little bit. Do something different.

Radha: We've been taught to organize in these ways, but our habits around organization do us a disservice when we come to organizing poems. I love this idea of the deck of cards, identifying those motifs, weaving them throughout in a more natural way, because that's how we live our lives. Right? We have one experience, and then there's a different sort of experience. And so on. I think that there's a case for a more organic structure that follows the human experience a little closer.

Diane: Yeah, and it's more subtle. It's more interesting to read. You get more surprises cropping up for the reader through the manuscript.

Radha: Diane, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. You provided so much advice that we all can take to heart and use on a practical level.

Learn more about Diane Lockward, The Strategic Poet, and Terrapin Books.

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