Yes And

What do binge-worthy TV shows and poetry have in common?

Photo by TJ Arnold on Unsplash

Before winter’s big edits, we get fall's accumulations—piles of school forms, piles of leaves, a million World Series baseball games. It’s the perfect time to consider “Yes, and…” in our poetry.

To that end, this Sunday I’m teaching a new class for Lighthouse Writers Workshop called Poetic Sequence: Writing Poems in Sections or in a Series. Section poems have hard breaks between parts (such as numbered sections). They’re typically longer than your average narrative poem. Poems written in a series include separate but interconnected poems, such as a sonnet sequence.

I’ve had a blast preparing for it. (There were a few spots left last time I checked. It’s on Zoom, by the way.) There are so many benefits to writing with this approach. Here are a few off the top of my head.

1. You can juxtapose POVs—characters, objects, scenes, places, etc. Hooray for this. The freedom to change it up makes poems more fun to write and more engaging for the reader, too.

2. Modernism and collage art have expanded poetic possibilities, too, meaning we can really break the rules. Collage, from French meaning “to glue,” gives the artist permission to put disparate things together to make a new whole. In a very good way, the collage approach plays against our writing defaults—our narrative and logic training. Writing in sequence frees the poet’s mind—and the reader’s—in exciting ways.

3. You can leave unnecessary connective tissue out. I can get pretty gummed up in all of the details when I’m wrestling a complex topic—for example, my grandfather’s involvement in the Manhattan Project and how that legacy will affect my children (you know, the really easy topics! hahaha). With a sequential or segmented approach, I don’t have to connect all the dots logically or narratively. I can shift perspective without leaving the broader territory.

4. We are wired for episodes. Stranger Things and The Wasteland do have something in common. They’re episodic. Each segment focuses on a different dimension. Consider it a brilliant instinct to keep going, one that keeps us from false, flat endings. When you think of working episodically, you’re free to experiment, to say (as in the improv game) “Yes AND…” rather than “This is it. End of story.” On the other hand, the hard break between sections or linked poems also allow poets to contradict themselves in juicy ways (“No, but …”).

I admire poem sequences like Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets” and Terrance Hayes’s book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Each of Heaney’s and Hayes’s poems could stand alone, but together they have piercing resonance and meaning. 

I’m also drawn to poets who use poetic sequence to constellate variable experiences, viewpoints, feelings into an organic whole, like Carol Moldaw’s “The Lightning Field” series or the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s sectioned poems, where each segment seems like winter light angled through a distinctly different window. 

We’ll be looking at some of those on Sunday, as well as poems by Luci Tapahonso, Kaveh Akbar, Ada Limón, Carolyn Forché, Mai Der Vang, Victoria Chang, and James Richardson.

Do you write segmented poems or poems in series? What would you add to the list of benefits?

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Upcoming Poet to Poet Classes

Mapping Territory: How to Organize a Poetry Manuscript

(Zoom class, Sunday November 13, 10am-1pm MT)

You know how to craft a poem that makes a complete journey. Yet, when it’s time to organize a book-length manuscript, you may feel lost amidst your poems’ many themes, images, narratives, voices, and POVs. This session explores useful tools to map a collection’s terrain, including how to identify primary and secondary themes (They may not be what you think!), establish the major legs of the readers’ journey (how to group poems into sections), and use titles to transform a sheath of poems into a book that guides the reader thoughtfully through its territory. 

Check out the new Poet to Poet website for upcoming conversations, classes, and more.