Last month at my poetry reading in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the bookstore owner introduced me with an anecdote. He described an open-mic regular who summoned the courage to read because he realized that “everyone’s got something to say.” I recalled the summer in my early 20s when I stumbled upon that insight, although it took more many more years for me to muster the courage to read my work in public. But his story inspired me to reflect: did my subjects sustain my writing practice for twenty-five years, or was it something more? At the reading’s close, I answered that question; my attention to craft, rather than topic, propels me. Lately, I’ve loved crafting the organization of manuscripts.
Before my (limited) study of rhetoric taught me to appreciate arrangement as a flexible creative tool, anything that smacked of structure felt too constraining. I had to learn through practice that received forms of all kinds can be altered, expanded, and/or revised, their boundaries pushed, sometimes even dissolved altogether. Once I grasped this for individual poems, ordering a manuscript for the first time developed my appreciation for arrangement as an intellectual enterprise because there was no set convention, just kernels of advice passed along via mentors.
- In Postcard on Parchment (ABS Press 2008), I arranged sections loosely around the emotional themes I experienced during the two years I lived and taught as a young woman from the United States living in Turkey.
- In Keeping Them Alive (WordTech Editions 2010), I placed poems about pregnancy and my son’s infancy in chronological order and interspersed poems about the death of my sister. This braid created a tension regarding the fragile and contested space of motherhood.
- In Bluewords Greening (Terrapin Books 2016), I used an interlude to bridge two sections. The first, “Bluewords,” is about epilepsy and language loss, and the second, “Greening,” is about recurrent miscarriage. Both explore the possibilities and limitations of the body.
- Untrussed (University of New Mexico Press 2016) is by far the most narrative-driven arrangement of poems I have put together. Here the speaker explores romantic love, love lost, and creative re-emergence.
To structure a manuscript means embracing an opportunity to articulate an argument or offer a particular reading experience. And yet as I wrote and revised the poems in my newest book, The Poet & The Architect (Terrapin Books 2021) exactly what that experience would be seemed more obscure than in my previous books. I had a handful of love poems inspired by my second marriage to a professor of architecture. I had another bunch that explored buildings and places. Seeking associations, I pinned up poem drafts on an 8’ x 4’ board in the architecture studio where my husband taught. Three themes emerged: love making, life making, and place making. Some poems fit two or all three categories, which flummoxed me. After a few days of reflection, I sought an organic metaphor—one already in the material—to illuminate the thematic associations. I considered grids, blueprints, maps, procedures and processes before I landed on the spiral. The idea of spiral became an organizational strategy.
Many poems still fit into multiple thematic sections, but the spiral helped me conceptualize how poems could return to earlier themes, picking up images introduced in those poems and broadening or expanding them. I decided to start each ring with the most intimate poems and move outward from there. For example, the first poems are short and set both spatially and temporally before the meeting of the poet and the architect. Next the poems move outward from the intimacy of new coupledom to establishing a family and experiencing life together. “Credo,” which employs syllabic lines based on fractal integers, gathers fractal images from life, nature, and architecture, and ends the book with an invocation of time and space in a much broader context.
During this part of my manuscript-making process, which spanned several months and coincided with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, attending to structure motivated me to work. The pandemic dampened my excitement regarding new projects but monkeying around with structural revision felt like playtime. And honestly, I never thought anyone would notice until an emerging writer in my community wrote a review that commented on the structure in particular: “The Poet & The Architect is an intelligent, loving, masterful assemblage organized in “rings,” extending outward from the personal and immediate (e.g., falling in love) to the more long-range and communal (e.g., lasting relationships in the context of supportive scaffolding). [The poet and the architect’s] increasingly interwoven visions of art and life offer opportunities for metaphor and insight.” I was thrilled that my attention to craft was evident—and working! I hope she surmised that attending to craft is its own way of saying something, a subject of its own.
