As I hope/plan to organize a poetry manuscript this year, this post is immensely helpful. I especially like the suggestion to flag opening and closing images throughout poems to discern connections and thematic throughlines. Also, it's very helpful to think of the manuscript as a tapestry, rather than a book. I will bookmark this post, thank you!!
Thank you for this insightful and helpful article on how to organize a manuscript. I found your tips and examples very useful and inspiring. I especially liked how you explained the difference between a collection and a book, and how to create a narrative arc and a thematic coherence. This is exactly the kind of lecture I wanted at the Elk River Writers Conference. I hope to that you offer these type of craft lectures in future workshops.
I imagine that poets like Arthur Sze, who has said he writes from what comes, often unbidden, and then organizes the poems such that they speak to one another, suggest a chronology of experience. Impressionistic, perhaps. What makes this approach work so well for some?
Great post, Sean, very helpful--on Ginsberg, though, he once came to a class on craft I was taking for my masters at NYU. He talked about how he really didn't believe in crafting a manuscript, but saw it as a collection of poems that resulted from a moment in time in a poet's life, so maybe that's why the order seems to disintegrate after the initial poem, Howl. I've always read those other poems almost as postscripts or an afterword.
I think your comment relates to one I have just posted. I would add that it is not Ginsberg who is overrated, but perhaps some of his work. From a data-driven perspective, we are not in a position to rate the man so much as his oeuvre.
As I hope/plan to organize a poetry manuscript this year, this post is immensely helpful. I especially like the suggestion to flag opening and closing images throughout poems to discern connections and thematic throughlines. Also, it's very helpful to think of the manuscript as a tapestry, rather than a book. I will bookmark this post, thank you!!
you're welcome... so glad it was helpful
Thank you for this insightful and helpful article on how to organize a manuscript. I found your tips and examples very useful and inspiring. I especially liked how you explained the difference between a collection and a book, and how to create a narrative arc and a thematic coherence. This is exactly the kind of lecture I wanted at the Elk River Writers Conference. I hope to that you offer these type of craft lectures in future workshops.
Thanks, Sean. This is super helpful.
Thank you for offering these principles, a lot of your insights were surprising and interesting. I'll try some of these out!
Thanks Sean.
This talk on manuscript organization is so helpful.
Linda
I imagine that poets like Arthur Sze, who has said he writes from what comes, often unbidden, and then organizes the poems such that they speak to one another, suggest a chronology of experience. Impressionistic, perhaps. What makes this approach work so well for some?
Great post, Sean, very helpful--on Ginsberg, though, he once came to a class on craft I was taking for my masters at NYU. He talked about how he really didn't believe in crafting a manuscript, but saw it as a collection of poems that resulted from a moment in time in a poet's life, so maybe that's why the order seems to disintegrate after the initial poem, Howl. I've always read those other poems almost as postscripts or an afterword.
I think your comment relates to one I have just posted. I would add that it is not Ginsberg who is overrated, but perhaps some of his work. From a data-driven perspective, we are not in a position to rate the man so much as his oeuvre.
Nice description of concatenation as deliberate editorial, rhetorical and literary device. Thanks for reposting.
Putting together my first full-length manuscript of poems now. Thanks.
I know I will reread this post many times. Thanks Sean.
Definitely the spread-them-all-over-the-floor method!