Throw Your Manuscript Down the Stairs

Inside poets’ book-development processes, with Sarah Giragosian, co-editor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Giragosian about the new anthology Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (co-edited with Virginia Konchan, published by University of Akron Press). I’m excited to share this illuminating and delightful conversation with you!

There are so many ways to approach assembling a manuscript. Marbles on the Floor provides a rare look at how contemporary writers approach the process. Sarah and I discussed the variety of techniques suggested in the anthology, as well as writing “project books” vs. accumulative poetry collections and structural choices that build cohesion and momentum in a manuscript. 

In a nutshell, I highly recommend this anthology.

Sarah is the author of the poetry collection Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). Her writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, The Missouri Review, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.

Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems was “conceived from a poetic dialogue on how to shed light on the art and science behind the material construction of a poetry collection. This anthology of interconnected essays (craft, lyric, and critical) explores the art and technique of poetry manuscript assembly as articulated by poets in all stages of their careers.  A timely, invaluable, and compact resource for creative writing teachers, as well as emerging and established poets honing their craft, writers in other genres (fiction and non-) will also benefit from this widely applicable yet nuanced discussion of how to bring a book into being.”

Watch the video below or keep scrolling to read the interview.

Throw Your Manuscript Down the Stairs

Radha: What sparked the idea for this anthology? What do you hope readers get from reading the essays that are collected in the book?

Sarah: There are some wonderful resources out there about assembling the poetry manuscript, such as April Osmonds work, Jeffrey Levine's blog, and another anthology called Ordering the Storm. But poetry manuscript assembly is under theorized, and it concerns poets at various stages of their careers. 

We wanted to create an anthology to bring in diverse readers and writers around the topic, whether they’re early in their career or at more advanced stages. who would be able to begin to theorize what is, I think, largely an intuitive process. 

I think the book could be useful for emerging, new poets—those who are just thinking about putting a manuscript in order, whether it be a chapbook, or a full collection—but also for those who are practicing poets who have published widely. I think they’ll enjoy the refreshers and strategies for assembling a collection.

Radha: You mentioned book assembly being “under theorized.” You're also talking about strategy. Is there a connection in your mind between the theory side and the strategy side?

Sarah: There’s a combination of both in the anthology. Some authors do real theoretical work and close readings. Steven Kampa, for example, has an essay in the anthology that addresses what he calls the complicated versus the generative book. The generative book is a book that is gathered and arranged, as the poet writes each individual poem, whereas the generative book, is arranged as a whole. He also calls this “the project book” and offers close readings of a number of contemporary poets, including Erica Dawson, and AE Stallings. He examines both the benefits and challenges of conceiving the project book. 

But you'll also find in this anthology a lot of strategies for getting physical with the book, so as to think about coherence, opportunities for continuity. Kazim Ali’s essay is interested in fragmentation and post-lyric poetry as discontinuous.

Radha: The choice between those two approaches—the book that assembles poem by poem versus the book that is project based—is constantly present in the work that I do with students. It’s a concern of so many poets because we’re working in a publishing environment now that seems to favor books with strong themes and coherence. So is it best to try a project-based approach? I'm not one to say, but I think that comes up a lot in poets’ minds. What I love about the anthology is that it suggests the wide variety of approaches we have to build a book with intentionality, so that it does have coherence or, like you said, has variation or even discontinuity.

Sarah: Building manuscripts with intention is explored in depth in this anthology. I also was surprised and excited by some of the the authors’ forays into more experimental approaches. I enjoyed Alyse Knorr’s chapter that explores more spontaneous methods of putting the poetry manuscript together, including throwing the manuscript down the stairs—being open to associative connections that may not occur to the poet on a conscious level.

A lot of the authors are thinking about ways to get physical with manuscripts, whether it be annotating poems, color coding, using post-its—ways to engage the body in the process of putting the manuscript together. 

Radha: Is there a particular strategy or insight that surprised you most?

Sarah: One thing I had not expected was how many writers mentioned the importance of secrecy and mystery in manuscripts. Marianne Moore says omissions are not accidents. We can be strategic about the poems that don't cohere with the rest of the manuscript, but Kazim Ali, Diane Seuss, and a few others addressed opportunities for secrecy. Maybe the manuscript is withholding something that will be realized by the reader.

Radha: I love that. It’s the same principle we're working with in an individual poem, right? Silences are as important as the words on the page. I always think of Jorie Graham saying “I am half in love with silence.” It makes sense to bring silence into the context of a creating a book as a whole. We tend to think about a book as filling out space, and yet what's not said is just as important. 

Did you learn anything about your own process as a result of assembling this this book? Did it illuminate any truths for you?

Sarah: When I wrote my first couple of books, I think that I was a little less conscious about structure than I am now. Two things have resonated with me, among many other things. Christopher Salerno had wonderful meta-discursive exercise: What would the blurb for my book be, if it were published? How would I describe my book to an editor? Those were really helpful.

He also suggests that the first section of the manuscript can be an exploration of a mythopoetics, building the architecture for the speaker’s journey. That was something that I had intuited but wasn't thinking about on a conscious level. I found that to be helpful. 

I was inspired by Karyna McGlynn chapter on collage essay. She explores ways to get physical with the manuscript and also the ways that her early interest in visual art influenced and shaped her own poetics. So I'm thinking more about how collage—which is highly associative—can play a role. 

Annie Finch writes a remarkable chapter about creating an organizing structural principle for your manuscript. She writes about paratactic and hypotactic structure. The hypotactic structure is a rich way of finding ways to spread out poems that might have strong thematic connection. They might become dispersed throughout the manuscript rather than compressed in one place. 

I am working on a manuscript right now that started off as an extended poem. I've separated it into poems and carefully placed them in various parts of the manuscript. They create a kind of narrative. It’s perhaps a less intuitive way to structure them into the manuscript, but really useful, because there is a thread, a substory or subnarrative.

Radha: I’m drawn to that idea of separating poems, creating thematic threads across a manuscript. It can feel counterintuitive because we have so much training in standard narrative or chronological order. We have a tendency (probably down to the neural structure of the brain!) to group things that are alike. In a manuscript, for flow, we need permission to go beyond those defaults, to lean into associative strategies—the collage strategy, for example. 

I was drawn to McGlynn’s practice of collage, and also Victoria Chang’s chapter that likens book assembly to bonsai care. Both suggest the longterm effort, the bit-by-bit, piece-by-piece of putting elements in relation to one another. I love that these rich metaphors and practices in other disciplines can be used to describe the process.

Sarah: The extended metaphor essays in this collection are astonishing. Victoria Chang's analog of caring for the bonsai tree or tending to an ailing mother—as metaphors for tending to the manuscript they are compelling. Diane Seuss's essay explores Emily Dickinson's herbarium, the practice of curating flowers as akin to assembling the poetry manuscript. The extended metaphor essays in this collection speak to perhaps not just poets, but even fiction writers or nonfiction writers.

Radha: I do think these poetic principles apply across disciplines. A lot of my students are painters and collage artists. They apply what they learn in poetry to visual art and then bring the practice of assembling visual art back to the process of making poems and manuscripts. 

Sarah: I think that as poets we have to think about how our work can be in conversation with other disciplines. Being eclectic thinkers, poets are interested in that cross pollination. I’m proud of the way that a lot of these writers have thought about how poetry can interface with other disciplines and the visual arts.

Radha: In your own work as a poet, what was the process like for you in assembling your first two collections? What do you wish that you'd known earlier? 

Sarah: My first collection is called Queer Fish, I refer to it as a queer bestiary. I was thinking about queer ecologies and queer intimacies. We know that the animal kingdom has numerous examples of same-sex relation and sexuality that slips out of normative reproductive paradigms. In that book, I was thinking about animals, about forms of contingency and relation. That was like the driving force behind that manuscript. In that way, it was a project book. 

But I wonder if I was too heavy handed with titled sections, epigraphs as gateways into certain sections. Now that I'm thinking more about looser connections, looser associations that can be rich in a poetry manuscript, offering readers different pathways or alleyways of thought through the manuscript. I wonder if my approach would have been quite so controlled. 

It was a collection that came out of my dissertation. I was interested in philosophical and theoretical questions, and I wonder if I could have put more consideration into my structural choices, how those support the reader’s experience through the collection. 

With the new manuscript, I’m using the strategies that I've learned from this anthology. I've gotten a lot more physical with my manuscript. I'm using post-it notes, annotating parts of the manuscript, writing down notes about the associations that a particular poem may have. Poems are not reducible to subject or theme, of course, but there might be certain reverberations across poems that I want to pay attention to and think about how they might be scattered throughout the manuscript. 

Radha: Always, when I teach manuscript development, I remind folks to take the tools that work for them and to leave behind any that don't work. This anthology offers so many tools and opportunities to find different approaches that do work. I appreciate the variety in the anthology.

Sarah: I do as well. There are infinite ways to order the manuscript. There's a risk of getting lost in that process. In my current manuscript, I've tried various iterations and combinations. It's a rich experiment. Sometimes putting the manuscript in a different order, I might notice something that I hadn't been fully conscious of before. 

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Details about the anthology can be found at Akron University Press. Learn more about Sarah’s work at sarahgiragosian.wordpress.com.

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Upcoming Events / Poet to Poet Community

The Poets Circle: Drop-in Conversations

MARCH: The Problem of Themes

March 15, 12-1pm MT

Is a thematic approach to writing poetry helpful or harmful for your process? Should you consider themes prior to putting a book together? How do themes emerge and play out in your work? How do themes manifest in the works of others?

APRIL: Weaving the Thread—On Coherence

Apr 5, 6-7pm MT & Apr 19, 12-1pm MT

How do you cultivate coherence in your work? How do authors you admire create coherence in their work, across poems?