The Poetry Manuscript: Arts and Crafts
Here, adapted from my article in the 2007 issue of the AWP Job List (there titled Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript: Some Ideas on Creation and Order) is a revised and updated advice on making a book out of your individual poems, given as one who reads three-to-four thousand manuscripts a year.
Admittedly, some of this advice remains concrete, generic, and “merely” stylistic, although I suppose even nuts and bolts have some intrinsic value when collected in one place. As style is a matter of taste, you must take into account that what I say reflects my own prejudices and preferences.
Many of these thoughts concern more artistic matters: What is the artistic process as applied to making a poetry manuscript cohere? What are some useful approaches to the art of transforming individual poems into a transcendent whole?
In the next couple of weeks, I expect to expand upon some of these bits of advice, and at all times I invite comments and questions, which may be sent via blog commentary at the end of this installment, or privately, through the “contact me” email button. I hope that you’ll find this little compendium useful.
The art of the manuscript:
1) When organizing the manuscript, you aim to create nothing less than a work of art. As Robert Frost famously suggested (in so many words) if there are x number of poems in a book, the book itself is the final poem. You’ll want to think about what your book is “about,” and to include poems that carry those themes, that are somehow related, that “speak” to each other. Also, I find that it’s a good idea to tether poems together that are written more or less in the same creative period, lest they sound as though written by different poets – different versions of you. By this I don’t mean to suggest that a book need be written in any particular time-frame, but rather that the book include poems written during a period (a year, two years, five years, whatever) when your creative strategies have been consistent.
2) Every time we write a poem we announce to the world what we think a poem is. The poems you write when urging – wittingly or unconsciously – a particular aesthetic are the ones that belong in the same book. Spread all of your poems out on the floor, a floor that doesn’t need to be disturbed (easy for me to say, I know) and look at them. Read them. Live with them for days and days. See what relationships seem to be developing between the poems. What does that poem by the bureau have to say to the poem under the bed? Where do you see common images developing? In what directions do your various threads lead? What seem to be your concerns as a poet during this period of creativity, and how do they seem to want to group. What sorts of discoveries are your poems making? The process of inclusion and ordering is organic, calculated, thoughtful, instinctual, unconscious, and a somewhat Zen. You need time to permit all of those matters and anti-matters to work upon you, and upon your poems.
3) When ordering poems in your manuscript, pay no attention to which poems have been published (and where), and which poems not. At the conclusion of contests, I often (call me perverse) go back and look at the acknowledgment pages of finalists and semifinalists. I find that most poets place an inordinate and mistaken reliance on their publishing history in ordering poems (or in deciding to include certain poems). Many of us assume that because a journal editor smiled on a particular poem that it must be better than the poems not taken, or that a poem taken by Poetry or Agni must be better than one taken by a less well-known print or online publication. I am almost always amazed—amazed—on learning which poems have been taken and which not, and by whom. Nothing could be less relevant to creating a manuscript than whether and where the individual poems found a home. If you believe in your poems, and if you have good reason for believing that they belong together in a particular manuscript, then include them, and order them according to your own aesthetic judgment. Period. If that poem that The New Yorker took doesn’t work in this particular manuscript, save it for another book.
4) Continue to think about each poem according to: mood / tone; dominant images, characters / speaker, setting/season; chronology, and whatever other categories emerge as important to your own work. However you organize your collection, keep in mind that you are creating a book, and you cannot really know how the poems interact with each other unless you’ve done this work. Make multiple copies of each poem, try different orders with duplicate books, and live with them for awhile.
5) Make sure the poems that begin your collection establish the voice and credibility of the manuscript. They should introduce the questions, issues, characters, images, and sources of conflict/tension, etc., that concern you and that will be explored in the book. Think about the trajectory of the manuscript: you want to set the reader off on a journey, a path toward some (even if undisclosed) destination, but unless you’re writing an epic, forget about “arc.” The notion of “arc” is, in my opinion, too subterranean to be willed into being in any artistic undertaking, except as a result of the felicitous intervention of the muse of artistic balance. First make the book as a whole work as a whole; let others praise your “arc.”
6) Read your manuscript out loud, to yourself, start-to-finish. Slowly. Listen attentively. Repeat as needed.
7) Just because a poem has been previously published, or because last Tuesday you decided it was finished, does not mean that you are required to leave it alone. Rethink, re-enter, and if possible, re-vision each poem as if the Paris Review hadn’t nominated it for a Pushcart Prize. The manuscript that recently has been declared a semifinalist or finalist somewhere is perfectly ripe for revision. The same thinking applies even after (especially after) your book is taken for publication. Each poem is trying to tell you something you don’t already know. Sometimes it takes a poem several years to get through to us. Be attentive. Listen closely. Try things. Try other things.
8) Once you have created an order that you love, think about dividing the book into separate sections. You may or may not elect to go with distinct sections, but this organizational process will encourage you to think even more deeply about your order, about your concerns, and about what makes a book a book. When you see patterns emerging, you might want to go back and think yet again about revision, about further opening up the channels that permit the poems to talk to each other. Yes this is hard work. We’re poets. This is what we do. This is why it’s harder than the work of being mortal.
9) Weak poems. You know which they are. Don’t “hide” them inside the manuscript. Don’t include them. Period.
10) Find an effective title: from the title of a significant poem in your collection, or from a line in one of your poems, or from one of your epigraphs, or try something that may not appear verbatim in your collection at all, but some how signifies, or shapes the manuscript. That said, create about a dozen different titles and live with each for a while. Print out title pages for each possibility, tape them to the refrigerator door, and look at them early and often. Ask someone with cutting-edge aesthetic judgment: I suggest the 10-year-old who’s just figured out why your laptop won’t talk to the printer.
Nuts and bolts:
11) Less is more. Keep your manuscript in the area of 48-64 pages – show your reader that you’ve done the important work of weeding and pruning.
12) Beware the frontispiece poem (that poem of yours that you might have elected to place before your numbered pages or before your table of contents). This practice draws far too much attention to a single poem and, in my experience, the selected poem more often than not (80% of the time?) wilts beneath the bright lights. Apply this same cautionary note to the first poem in your manuscript, whether or not you’ve isolated it as a frontispiece.
13) Spell-check. Spell-check again.
14) Proof for consistency of grammar and punctuation. Have a friend do this—someone who can spell and has a deep understanding of the rules of grammar. It’s impossible to proofread for yourself, especially a document that’s taken years to develop. You “see” what’s in your head, not what’s on the page.
15) Proof for the Big Abstractions (i.e., “infinity,” “eternity,”) – the 19th century is over.
16) Proof for small abstractions (i.e., “dark”) – the 19th century is still over.
17) Proof for adverbs (carefully). They’re not your friends, unless you’re blessed with the lyrical gifts of Seamus Heaney, the word-drunk genius of Albert Goldbarth, or the million megawatt intelligence and intuition of Anne Carson, in which case, go for it.
18) While we’re at it, adjectives are abstractions: earn them well (see above, re. Goldbarth and Heaney and Carson).
19) Proof for mannerisms, i.e., have you use the word “pale” 20 times?
20) Do you tend to sew up your poems with something willfully plangent (poetic with a capital “P”) or a Yoda-like dollop of wisdom?
21) Do you tend to begin your poems with a line or two (or an entire stanza) of throat clearing?
22) Re-read the two preceding questions. Pretend for argument’s sake that you’ve answered yes to both. Now look at each and every poem with fresh eyes and ask yourself: a) Where does each poem really want to start? b) Where does each poem really want to end? Make no mistake: these are deeply artistic matters we’re talking about, here masquerading as craft questions.
23) When submitting your manuscript, send a cover letter if you like, but not a c.v. If you do send a cover letter, make sure it’s addressed to the intended press and not to some other press or some other editor (you’d be surprised), and don’t address your cover letter to the contest judge (you’d be surprised), and don’t say you’re in the process of a complete rewrite and will be sending the revised manuscript in a week or two (you’d be surprised), and remember that if it’s a contest we’re talking about, then the cover letter won’t be read at all unless you win or come close. If it’s an open reading (i.e., not a contest), I love having an opportunity to know something about the poet. All this said, in reading and selection manuscripts for publication, it’s all about the work, and it’s only about the work.
24) Don’t include dedications and thanks on a contest manuscript—there will be plenty of time for that later.
25) Don’t title a first book submission “New and Selected.”
26) Be judicious about epigraphs—they’re just so much hardware unless a poem clearly addresses or plays off of the epigraph in some intrinsic and transformative way.
27) Beware the epigraph that you choose to begin the book with or to announce a new section. Ask yourself whether it’s really important to the poem it sits atop like so much hardware. Do you really want your own language to follow Rilke’s or Bishop’s?
That’s more than enough for now. Questions or comments? Please feel free.
Jeffrey Levine 
Kim Triedman
October 12, 2011
Interesting to me that you suggest a full-out sequencing (and resequencing and resequencing…) of poems even before you consider breaking them up into sections. I’ve generally just kind of “lived with” the poems for awhile and meditated on the natural divisions among them before I take on sequence. i then take my first stab at ordering once those divisions have come clear to me.
What I like about your idea is that it allows connections to develop between poems which otherwise might not have the chance to sit beside and work off of one another. The problem I foresee is that once you put all your poems into the same pot you can become addled by all the endless connections, which makes it difficult to even consider then how they might be broken up into meaningful sections. In other words, the connections between the poems are very often at odds with the meaningfulness of the divisions; by honoring one level of connections, you can easily compromise the most organic of architecture for the MS as a whole.
Jeffrey Levine
October 12, 2011
I think the trick with sequencing, just as with revision, is to unlearn what we already “know.” I’m not so sure that becoming addled by endless possibilities is at all a bad place to be. So long as you don’t drive in that state. But seriously, any structural approach to learning from your poems how they want to be organized seems both arguable, and worthy. I like very much what you say about “meditat(ing) on the natural divisions among (the poems).” That said, if the “most organic architecture for the MS as a whole” (I love that phrase) were knowable, then no other work need be done. But I think that section-making is somewhat arbitrary, which is to say, there are likely several possible organic architectures. It seems a very good idea to listen especially hard to the connections that poems want to make with one another if the direction they’re tilting seems to upset the balance of one’s prescribed divisions. Maybe the best way to say what I mean is this: just as one needs to pay attention to the poem at the level of the line when writing, one needs to pay attention to the MS at the level of the poem when devising order. It’s from that dialogue–poem-to-poem– that the best revisions are launched.
Kim Triedman
October 12, 2011
comes at a very good time. i’ve been staring at poems on the floor off and on for a good year now…
many thanks for the thoughts, jeffrey.
Val Nieman
October 12, 2011
Very helpful! Working on 2 manuscripts and just beginning to consider how the poems will fit together. I’ll keep this to pass along to students facing their first collection jitters.
Scot Siegel
October 12, 2011
Great advice. I can vouch for the 10-year-old. Ours came up with a choice title by replacing one word in the title I had come up with. Her title was ten times better than mine, and it even rhymed with the one I was going to use. Needless to say, the book is forthcoming.
Big Wonderful Press
October 12, 2011
Wonderful advice. I am happy to hear that you do not consider acknowledgements in the judging process. I am often disappointed to hear how many contests readers do. Even those adhering to CLMP guidelines often still include the acknowledgements in the judging packet as long as the name of the author is not included. This is why too many poets allow their publications to influence their manuscript choices — because this behavior is reinforced by so many publishers.
My new press requires poets submitting a full-length book to have publication credits, but not necessarily in the manuscript submitted and we don’t consider them when reading the manuscript. This helps to ensure we only have serious literary writers, but hopefully doesn’t influence the manuscript. We also don’t run contests.
Elisavietta Ritchie
October 12, 2011
Always grateful for such advice…I’m in the midst of organizing two new collections of poems and one of short fiction, and while the poems all seem to fall into logical order and sections, then I worry that there is too much logic so I ought to throw the manuscript down the stairs and reassemble the whole in the new, arbitary order–
At the Colrain session several years ago the message seemed to be: try new juxtapositions.
But the argument for logical flow is strong…The manuscript takes its own shape…….
Re your comments on prior publication of individual poems: I do not have faith in a poem until some editor somewhere takes it. This year, however, in every tatter of time I have been so busy writing and have not submitted much, therefore the collection may not have the luxury of a full acknowledgments page.
However, I shall plunge on, and weed on…
Meanwhile, many thanks.
Alarie Tennille
October 12, 2011
Enjoyable reading, especially #23. Helpful advice. I particularly liked what you said about choosing a name for the ms. Thank you.
Eugenia Leigh
October 12, 2011
Thank you, Jeffrey! It is tremendously helpful to have—here in one place—a compilation of all the manuscript advice I’ve ever received (and then some). Thank you especially for this reminder: “Yes this is hard work. We’re poets. This is what we do. This is why it’s harder than the work of being mortal.” 🙂
Zeina Hashem Beck
October 13, 2011
Great advice. Love the part about not “hiding” the weak poems.
neelthemuse
October 13, 2011
Very informative….thank you Jeffrey!
Russell Buker
October 13, 2011
Jeffery:
Now you have me sorely troubled. Since my retirement as an English teacher I have been reading/writing poems almost every day and that is the order that I like to keep them but in saving them to my computer and removable device they get alphabetized, maddening so, and when I send copies to editors I have to revert back to dates written for any order that makes sense to me. Also, I do not like clumping poems into themes as it tends to make little books inside the book- can not the reader make the same discoveries that I did in creating?- creating an undue focus for the reader as in 15 poems of birds tends to make reader think of R.T.Peterson’s anthology. As to the book lengths themselves they tend to make their own divisions and I know when I have started another book not just accumulating a certain amount of pages.
thanks,
Russell Buker
Jeffrey Levine
October 13, 2011
Russell, you make some excellent points. I’ll have to address them in a larger context, later. But for now:
1) I don’t at all suggest “clumping poems into themes,” but rather starting the process of organizing a manuscript using thematic concerns as just one way of looking at what’s going on in your book. Deciding, then, where and when each poem on a similar theme might actually appear will be a more organic sort of decision-making process;
2) Of course you should — we all should — invite the reader to participate in the artistic process. There’s no art without the witness, and the art itself takes place somewhere (in some dimension) between the page and the reader. That said, trusting the reader to do some of the work and relying on the reader to do all of the organizational work (probably an unfair summary of what you’re saying) seems at odds with the goal. You want to guide your readers toward certain discoveries.
joy Gaines-Friedler
October 13, 2011
With my first book – I wanted the whole book, as Jeffrey points out in his essay, to read like one large poem. Therefore, music and rhythm played a big part in its sequencing. My trusted reader pointed out that I should use the first poem as the first poem – because it introduces characters that reappear throughout. I created sections based loosely on theme. But, music and rhythm were my criteria for the overall project. Thanks Jeffrey for articulating what, as an artist, I was only able to do instinctually.
Surazeus Simon Seamount
August 27, 2013
Hi Russell,
My solution to managing files of poems is to use date and name. For example I write a poem titled “Laughing Skull of Hamlet” on 13 April 2005, I name the document like this:
20050413_Laughing_Skull_of_Hamlet
Year_Month_Date_Title
That keeps all my poems organized.
Then I store them all in an access database which makes them all easily searchable, and I can spit them out into word documents using the generate letter temple feature.
caboti1
October 13, 2011
I wondering Jeffrey – if you could point to some books that you find particularly well put together. I’m not looking for poems or poets that you like – but the books themselves.
Jeffrey Levine
October 13, 2011
There are (of course) so many beautifully put-together books. I think that the late Larry Levis was a genius at organizing his books. A complex associative poet, he seems to tether poems together that share common or related images, then stretch those images, then identifiably move on from them, all the while holding themes together in a neat bundle. Look, for example, at Winter Stars (Pitt Poetry Series, 1985) and The Widening Spell of Leaves (Pitt Poetry Series, 1991). Or, if I may cite a Tupelo Press example, then the brilliant Dancing in Odessa, by Ilya Kaminsky, which weaves its dominant and subordinate themes through the book like a tapestry, making the book feel simultaneously historically important and deeply personal. Kyrie:Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt (Norton, 1996) is as deeply thoughtful about order as it is profound in its concerns. I’ll work on a more comprehensive list.
Seamus
October 13, 2011
An interesting question I’ve been facing: what if a group of poems is extremely different in terms of style (both prose poems and lined poems, for instance), mood, narrative personas and even the worlds conjured by each? Playing up/embracing such wide disparities seems like the only logical outcome, but it runs the risk of looking like a pell-mell shotgun blast to editors who may be looking for grand unification and clear development. Makes me concerned that my manuscript will get discarded for its orneriness before it’s given a chance.
What do you as an editor do when you encounter such manuscripts?
Jeffrey Levine
October 13, 2011
Seamus, this is always the big question when a poet employs a number of different strategies. You’ve done a fine job setting out what makes your poems different. Naturally, it’s not really possible to be specifically helpful without seeing the work itself. But I suggest that you recast your self-analysis: try to write a paragraph explaining why all of your ways of writing (and even the disparate “worlds conjured by each”) might, in fact, cohere. What theory or theories might you advance to justify their inclusion between the same covers? After all, even an anthology needs some unifying principles. When I encounter a manuscript like the one you describe, I try to answer the question I just asked for myself, although if the overall effect does, in fact, seem like a “pell-mell shotgun blast” I’ll likely want to duck and cover. But the idea is to take each and every manuscript on its own terms, and then to figure out, if possible, what the poet is up to in mixing strategies. And, just as voice itself requires a certain authority to carry any poem, the book itself needs to suggest the authority of the hand creating it.
Sergio Sanabria
October 13, 2011
Jeffrey, I am troubled about an underlying modernist snarkiness in #15 and #16: Proof for the Big/Small Abstractions (infinite/dark) (the 19th century is over)… Yes indeed, and so is the 20th. The infinite is available to us under new management, after Cantor (late 19th century, I know) and later developments in his Transfinite Cardinal Arithmetic, or Mandelbrot (fractal geometry). The infinite need no longer be equated with the Hegelian absolute or his Transcendentalist offspring, nor the Sublime. Cosmologists reel under the multiplicity of universes forced by any theoretical attempt to unify general relativity and quantum physics. Why would poetry collections become somehow suspect, if addressing the infinite, or an ever elusive god, new readings of Neoplatonic theories of light and dark, our ever-troubling mortality, and therefore the largest issues?
Jeffrey Levine
October 13, 2011
Not meant as snarky, really. It’s all about context, isn’t it? I have in mind the use of abstractions in their simplest form of misuse: as telling rather than showing. I’d love finding manuscripts that have at the center of their project, some form of the infinite redux. Under new management, indeed. Ben Lerner, Julie Carr, for example. But the existence of a thing, even and especially an abstract thing (i.e., time) is only established by its absence. Addressing the infinite, however, is not the same as using the word in the most abstract possible way, as a sort of lamppost to lean against when lighting up the figurative Gauloise. There’s laziness, and then there’s the opposite. I’m for the opposite, except on beach days. As everywhere in art, the manner of the telling–the style–is indistinguishable from the matter of the author’s vision. Ultimate “reality” is the surge of the brute contingency that flows over and around and through us, and in which no day, no idea, no understanding, no experience, perfectly reproduces the abstract design we seek to impose on it. After all, superluminal neutrinos, sort of like particles of light on speed, seem to be disrupting everything we know. All I’m saying; suddenly physicists are finding themselves hewing to the possibility of parallel universes; we poets actually live in them. So, when we talk about the abstract, we need to be precise.
Seamus
October 13, 2011
Thank you very much. That’s an extremely helpful reply. I like to think all these are attempts, if disparate in approach, at asking what’s happening behind the scenery, a la the coin-tossing in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It’s generous of you or any editor, it seems to me, to assume that the poet has indeed approached things with forethought and authority. I’m sure you develop a good ear for whether that’s true!
Rebecca Foust
October 13, 2011
Thanks for this very helpful article! According to the notes at the back of Winter Stars, the poems in that book “are arranged in the approximate order of their writing.” Doesn’t Merwin also sequence his books this way? It occurs to me that presenting poems in a ms in the order they were written can help to achieve the goal of a coherent voice or of what you call consistent “creative strategies.” Also that this kind of organization may result in thematic and aesthetic groupings that feel more organic than such groupings done “after the fact” since the topics and aesthetic obsessions that are dominating a writer’s thinking at any given time will naturally dominate the writing done during that period. Organizing poems in the order written can also achieve a natural momentum and trajectory—what the book’s later readers might call its “arc”– because it mimics the way the mind works in time, ruminating for awhile on a subject, then returning to it again and again but in the new light of intervening experience. Not that I’ve tried yet to organize a book this way. But I think I’ll pick the pages back up off the floor and give it a try. And will do a better job in the future of keeping track of when each poem was written.
Russell Buker
October 13, 2011
My Point exactly
Candid
October 28, 2011
This forum nedeed shaking up and you’ve just done that. Great post!
Dan Schneider
October 13, 2011
Thanks for this post. You mentioned freeing yourself up to use poems that were or weren’t published in the manuscript, not simply putting the published poems first or assuming that because they were published they are somehow better than the unpublished poems, all of which I find to be excellent advice. As someone writing without a lot of publishing credits, how important do you find it to publish poems in magazines before including them in a manuscript? Do publishers consider books that don’t include many previously published pieces or is it a good idea to try to get poems published in magazines first before sending a manuscript out?
Jeffrey Levine
October 13, 2011
Dan, you’re really asking two questions, one about the markers of the success of one’s craft (derived from the fact of publishing your poems), the other about the preferences of publishers for poets who publish. About the first, let me say that every so often we get a finalist or semifinalist manuscript from someone who hasn’t published much, but it’s very, rare. If you’re writing great stuff, and if you’re sending it out, you’ll get it published. Poets who are publishing are getting the essential corroboration they need to fuel their ambitions, and by virtue of publishing, are simultaneously building a following for their work. Of course I like to see that manuscripts rising to the top of the selection process consist of many published poems because I want to know that when we make the commitment to publish (which commitment is as close as one can come to a marriage without offending the Tea Party) we have someone who understands and appreciates what it means to be the biggest champion of their own work. We want our poets to believe in their work and for that belief to translate in the hard work of making their poems known to the world. Also, and maybe this is the main thing: the more time you’re taking to send poems out, revise them, send them out, revise them again, the greater the likelihood that those poems will grow and mature in the process. All this said, if a manuscript is submitted for a contest, the acknowledgment pages don’t figure into the process. I don’t see them, if at all, until the final decisions have been made. If an open reading, then I’ll certainly look to see where so-and-so is publishing these days. But great work trumps all other considerations.
nance van winckel
October 14, 2011
This was SO helpful. I’m passing it along to current and former poetry students.
Jeffrey Levine
October 14, 2011
Thank you so much, Nance. I’m honored.
Cheryl Ann
October 17, 2011
In regards to #2 and spreading poems on the floor to find connections and help determine an ordering, I can’t help but thinking my cats will then have some say in the matter and a book, “Cats arranging poems”, will soon be a temptation. Of course, Basho is the name of one of my cats and he may have some divine inspiration that would be useful. I appreciate your thoughts but still a bit stumped. A friend of mine, a music composer, thinks I should arrange by theme but I have been resisting that course. Yet find the process arbitrary still: one day one order seems organic, next day an entirely different order seems organic. I love the process and love difficult and challenging projects but maybe I just don’t grasp what this “talking” between poems actually is. Love your thoughts and strategies though – thank you.
Jeffrey Levine
October 17, 2011
So, you meant to say that Basho doesn’t already have a say?! But seriously, of course thematic concerns should play an important role in sequencing, but be very careful. After all, what could be more boring than one theme harped upon, over and over again? In a day or two I’m going to blog at bit more closely on the subject of sequencing, and the parallels we might notice between finding a “correct” sequencing when hanging paintings in a gallery and what we can learn from the fine arts that might help us better grasp the way works of art, including poems, talk to each other. In the meantime, I suggest that you hold onto just the ‘loving the process part,’ try to put the anxiety on hold, and go to a museum. Look at the paintings and try to figure out — not with the brain but with the lower sensors — what prompted the gallery to hang this painting next to that one, and not next to that other one. Think about tonalities, color, space, shape, and any other cognates that might seem to fit between the two languages: poetry and painting. Thanks for your so very thoughtful reply.
Carlen Arnett
November 18, 2011
Wicked good, Jeffrey. Thanks.
Robert Vaughan
July 31, 2013
Such great information Jeffrey! I added it to my HUMP day blog post at http://www.robert-vaughan.com.
Robert Vaughan
July 31, 2013
Such a great information packed post, Jeffrey! I added it to my HUMP day blog at http://www.robert-vaughan.com.
Jeffrey Levine
July 31, 2013
Thanks so very much, Robert!
Trev
August 1, 2013
I’m Composing my manuscript now and I’ve found your article quite helpful, but I have a few questions left unanswered.
1) Should I include a table of contents?
2) I’ve divided the manuscript into 5 sections does each section get it’s own page?
i.e. Page 1 “Part One”, Page 2 “Poem that Blows Your Mind” Page 3 “It Keeps Getting Better” Page 4 “Part Two”… ect.
3) In evaluating the final lay out in book form it strikes me there should probably be a blank page at the end of certain sections to allow a proper break for the next. Should I worry about this now or realize the editor has done this more often than I and will see the necessity.
I hope my questions are clear. Thanks for all your valuable information.
Jeffrey Levine
September 11, 2014
1. Yes
2. That’s a purely aesthetic choice that won’t affect the manuscript’s chances of being taken.
3. Again, a purely aesthetic choice.
As you suggest, once a book is taken, you’ll have plenty of time to work out layout and design issues with your publisher.
Trev
August 2, 2013
Just looked at the Tupelo Press page on manuscripts and I think I got my answers. I’m going with yes to 1) no to 2) and don’t doubt the editor to 3).
Sorry to bother you with questions I can answer myself.
Jeffrey Levine
August 3, 2013
Just right on every count!
jaynestanton
January 6, 2014
I’ve just discovered your excellent and comprehensive post via a link on Facebook (thank you, Antiphon Poetry Magazine). It confirms all the best advice I’ve been given/ have read, to date, on putting together a poetry collection – and some! It’s reassuring that I seem to be progressing along the right track in some respects, whilst there are aspects/avenues that I’d do well to explore. Thank you, Jeffrey 🙂
Jeffrey Levine
July 9, 2014
Thank you, Jayne!
Robin Houghton
January 7, 2014
Hi Jeffrey – like Jayne, I came here via the FB link from Antiphon. What a great example of a timeless blog post that just keeps giving. And the comments are as fascinating as the post itself. Thanks so much.
Jeffrey Levine
January 7, 2014
Thanks so much, Robin. The next blog post will be all about new ideas in manuscript making — the advanced version. “On Making the Poetry Manuscript 2.0” Out soon! Jeffrey
Jeffrey Levine
July 9, 2014
Thanks so very much, Robin!
Judith Crispin
January 16, 2014
I just wanted to say thank you.
Genuine Poetry
February 1, 2014
Best advice I’ve read in years! Thank you for sharing!
amyspen
May 26, 2014
Reblogged this on Amy's Pen and commented:
Some very helpful advice on assembling a poetry collection and fine-tuning individual poems!
Dean K Miller
June 3, 2014
Indeed, a wonderful collection of advice/inputs….it’s almost poetic in itself. thanks.
Dean K Miller
June 3, 2014
After having several essays and poems come together in a previous work, I am now “struggling” to put a poetry book together. Your advice is going a long ways in helping me solve the puzzle. Thanks for this. I will read, re-read, think and then read this again.
Grant
July 1, 2014
Reblogged this on UnIambic and commented:
The publisher of Tupelo Press offers advice on putting together a poetry manuscript.
Deena Hardin
July 18, 2014
I can’t believe I’m just now seeing this! Amazing and very helpful advice. I self-published my first book and plan to do the same with the second soon, and I was looking for advice specifically on ordering the poems. The first was fairly easy: many of them were from early in my life, so I put them in chronological order. My friends said they could “hear” me growing up as they read them. The new one will be from a 15-year period that was tumultuous in many ways. You’ve given me a lot to think about, and I appreciate it!
Neil McCarthy
August 5, 2014
I haven’t seen my floors in years.
Joanne
August 30, 2014
I really like your blog.. very nice colors & theme.
Did you design this website yourself or did you hire
someone to do it for you? Plz reply as I’m looking
to create my own blog and would like to know where u got this from.
thank you
Jeffrey Levine
September 11, 2014
Thanks, it’s a WordPress layout choice. I hired someone to help me, as I find setting my car’s clock a challenge. I can put you in touch with my designer if you like.
Alice
September 11, 2014
great information! right on! or write on!
Megan Wildhood
June 15, 2015
Cover letters are super frustrating for me; I never know what to say and would just as soon not waste anyone’s time, including mine. But I’ve been finding that a lot of contests ask for one in their submission guidelines, which makes me feel like it’s not optional. You outline what a submitter should *not* include in a cover letter; any advice on what *should* be there when we have to write them?
Jeffrey Levine
August 1, 2015
Say who you are in the world, what you do, what you care about in your writing. Cover the essential ground: what sort of successes in the publishing world have you had? Books? Magazine/journal publications? Prizes, awards, fellowships. Where have you studied, and with whom? What do you do besides write? We’re all different (publishers) when it comes to what we’re looking for in a cover letter. It doesn’t matter to me so much what you say as how you say it. Great prose is hard to write, and “business” prose is stultifying. So some personality in a cover letter is always a huge plus (for me). Also, since I get so many cover letters each submission period that address me as “Jack” or “Jeremy” or “Jeffrey Shotts,” it’s a good idea to get the name right. Also, since a contest judge doesn’t read 1,000 manuscripts, it’s rather silly to address your cover letter to the contest judge. The judge gets the finalists, period. And the judge won’t ever see the cover letter. BTW, I look at the cover letter only at the conclusion of contests (except the July Open Reading Period, which is not a contest and not anonymous), and I do so because I enjoy knowing something about who’s submitting. I’m interested in people as people. If you’re just starting out, if you’ve never published a poem, say that. Be forthright. And say why you think your work is ready. But we NEVER require a bio or cover letter, and I don’t know who does.
Holly Wren
May 2, 2016
Thanks for sharing your advice on this topic. I’m passing it on to some of my writing students who’ve started to ask many of the questions you tackle in your article.
Jeffrey
June 24, 2016
Hello! My name is Jeffrey as well (how odd) and I am 13. I wanted to submit a 5 poem manuscript to contests so I could gain popularity in the writing world. I don’t mean fame (even though it would be nice), I mean a push into the world that’ll let them know I’m serious about writing. I really LOVE writing and I’m currently making a book. Back to the main question, could you explain step-by-step how to write one? And by steps, I mean EVERY steps there is. Thank you for reading this!
Jeffrey Levine
June 24, 2016
Hello other Jeffrey. Here’s my advice: if you’re serious about wanting to be a poet, concentrate on making poems. Read everything you can. Take courses in poetry wherever you can. Find a poet to act as a mentor. Unless you’ve been submitting individual poems to good journals — and publishing them — it’s WAY too early to think about a book. Be patient.
John Donley
February 27, 2017
I’m a sixty-seven year old retired bricklayer who started writing poems forty years ago. A 451 degree fit of frustration returned most to the ether. Restarted about ten years ago for a while, then picked up the pace mid 2016 mirroring the passion of the election season. Today I received my first official rejection from Poetry Mag after waiting seven months for a reply. Two of the four had very hard edged political themes that I was screaming to be read when I wrote them. Once Hillary won, I thought that they would lose all relevance and consigned to old news. Is political verse of the moment and not generally for an enduring collection?
Jeffrey Levine
March 2, 2017
John, there’s no easy answer. When we write political poems, either we do so with a view toward letting the poem lean toward something larger than the moment of its creation, or we stay sharply focused and then the poem may or may not be of the moment. Or you can revise a poem whose moment may seem to have passed in order to make it more current and enduring. Sorry, that’s all pretty fuzzy, but you’re asking a huge question. Meanwhile, do your research. Some journals (most) don’t seem to publish “political” poems, but many do: Beloit Poetry Journal, for example. Whatever you write, if you do so from the perspective of a retired 67-year-old bricklayer, you might find some success. Read Lee Sharkey’s new book, “Walking Backward,” for a peek at how “political” poems might be thought about.
John Donley
March 2, 2017
Thank you, Jeffrey. Most of what I write has some emotional or psychological focus which bubbles to to the surface encapsulated in my own idiosyncratic style. A bit too raw for the folks at Poetry Mag I’m afraid. Thanks for the advice.
Jennifer Gennari
March 28, 2017
Thank you — found via googling “how to organize a poetry book.” I especially like no-more-needs-to-be-said about weak poems. Your advice, paired with April Ossmann’s “Thinking Like an Editor,” is enough to help me get started.
Bella
February 17, 2019
Thank you so much, Mr. Levine for writing this — it captures thoughts and insights i’ve wondered about as i prepare this manuscript.