It feels a bit surreal to be publishing my first full length collection of poetry, Flame Nebula, Bright Nova, at 45, after 20 years of being active in the poetry field—and 15 years after the publication of my poetry chapbook. It can be easy, on a journey like this, for a writer to think that maybe she just doesn’t have what it takes to put out a book. And I’ll admit, there were times when I felt that way. But when I look back—really look—at what the obstacles were to getting my book out into the world, I can name five specific things that contributed to the slow crawl toward book publication. Here they are:
- Not enough schema about poetry collections.
- Not enough poems, period.
- Not enough related or similar poems
- Not sure if the manuscript is working.
- Not sure how to navigate the publication process.
Before I go into detail about each of these obstacles, and how I got around them, I want to call out that even when I felt like a book might be beyond me, I refused to question my innate worth as a poet or my commitment to the craft of poetry. It is my belief that we can all become more skilled, intentional readers and writers (myself included). I also came to recognize that while my ability to write poetry (specifically, to conceptualize the parts of a poem working together), did help me compile Flame Nebula, building a book wasn’t the same thing as building a poem. Putting a book together was an entirely new way of thinking about poetry, and it took time to bend myself toward it. I’m hopeful that in synthesizing my thoughts on how I got there might shorten the journey for you. So let’s take a look at that first obstacle.
Obstacle: not enough schema about poetry collections.
While my husband, who is also a poet, has been a long-time reader of poetry collections, I found myself more drawn to anthologies and journals. Maybe it’s a hold-over for my love of mixtapes. With few exceptions, if I picked up a stand-alone book of poetry, I wanted something that told a story (like Belocq’s Ophelia or The Collected Works of Billy The Kid). Otherwise, I wanted to consume the poet’s whole body of work. While this approach to reading poetry fueled me to be a versatile poet, it left me somewhat oblivious to the ways in which collections of poems hold together.
My way around it: I had to become familiar with how stand-alone poetry books are structured. I did this in several ways. First, I read Ordering The Storm. It left me inspired (and confused!) by all the ways a manuscript could come together. It made it clear to me that my only way forward was by unpacking specific books. It was time to put my background in literary analysis to work. Soon, I found myself reading and reviewing poetry books for Mom Egg Review. This forced me out of my poet-brain and into my lit-crit brain, which it turns out, is the brain I needed to figure out how books work. I also started trading manuscripts with other poets. It was easier to think about how to change a book-in-progress when said book was not mine. Finally, I looked for low-cost classes that were geared toward manuscript building. I took a couple at different points in my journey, and one that I’d recommend, called Book as Architecture, is offered by the Downtown Writers Center at the YMCA of Central New York.
Obstacle: not enough poems, period.
One of the things I learned in my study of manuscripts is that in order to build a manuscript of 40-45 poems, I really needed about 75-80 poems to sort through. In some ways, I found that assembling a manuscript was like collaging. And while the approach makes so much sense to me, it turned out to be a huge obstacle as well. I don’t subscribe to the write-everyday model of writing (my life just hasn’t allowed for that, and it doesn’t suit my temperament, either). I’ve generally written well under two conditions: when I have an abundance of time to reflect (ha!) and when I’m under extreme emotional stress (no thanks!). This meant that some years I’d only write a handful of poems. I had to face facts. I didn’t have enough raw material to sort through, to collage with. I had gaping holes in my collection and nothing to fill them with.
My way around it: I signed up for mailing lists and prompts. I worked from books. Sometimes I’d hit a prompt that clicked and write a poem or two. But I found I couldn’t sustain the practice. I think it’s the high-school athlete in me—it’s so much easier for me to do the hard things when a coach tells me, do the hard thing. So I started signing up for generative workshops. I found three places that have been just magic for me: the DWC (mentioned above), Marj Hahne’s workshops, and The Poetry Salon. I started setting a goal for the number of poems I’d write in a year (52), and while I haven’t made it yet, I’m holding steady generating between 30 and 40 poems a year, and I finally have enough pieces to work them together in meaningful ways.
Obstacle: Not enough related or similar poems.
This is likely a byproduct of that mixtape mentality I mentioned above. I love being a poet that’s just as likely to write a sestina as a concrete poem (see “Gravity” in Flame Nebula). I love that I write about the world at large and about the mundane bits of life. About family. About heartbreak. With literary conceit. With surrealistic tendencies. And prose poems, too. It seemed I was trying to write my own Collected Works. I could hold a theme, hold a topic or form or style across a fist’s worth of poems, but that was it. A thousand saplings, no trees.
My way around it: I had to accept that I wasn’t going to put together a manuscript of my “best” poems. They were too disparate. Instead, I needed to build that poetry collage I mentioned. I had to find the right colors, shapes, sounds, feelings to string together into a whole. For me that became speaking in the images of fire, landscape, and space, and telling the story of motherhood from all the angles I could reach it. Now I could sort poems and organize my manuscript. I continued to write poems outside of these parameters. I just stopped wondering how I was going to include them in this book.
Obstacle: Not sure if the manuscript is working.
After reading about 20 of my own poems in a row, I get manuscript-hypnosis. My ability to think critically about structure, motif, tone—they are all out the window and I’m back into my memories. I lose the critical edge I need that separates my empathy for the speaker of my poem from my critical lens at how the poem is working within a larger body, with or against the poems adjacent to it. Every time I sat down to read a new arrangement of my manuscript from start to finish, I found myself alternatively loving or hating the whole thing with a sense of overwhelm and dread, unsure of how to move forward. I lost trust in my own judgment.
My way around it: There were two key insights that helped me here. I had to stop trying to build the manuscript as a whole book, and focus instead on the cohesion of sections. Chapbook size chunks are more manageable to me. I realized that if I got the sections right, I could then think about how those sections fit in with one another. I then started asking people to read my manuscript. I needed fresh eyes and honest feedback. Too get this, most frequently, I traded with poets I trusted. Twice I paid for someone to read Flame Nebula: once when I was hitting my head up against the wall after several years of feeling stuck, and once when it was almost done, because I needed a good copy editor. Both times were worth the expense. All in all, Flame Nebula had at least seven readers before I was satisfied with it, not including readers for contests and publishing houses.
Obstacle: Not sure how to navigate the publication process.
I had my first cohesive draft of Flame Nebula, under the title Of Thee I Sing, in circulation in 2020. It placed in the Hillary Gravendyk Prize, but wasn’t picked up for publication, and was turned down, with generous notes, from a handful of other publishers. There was enough good feedback coming to keep me believing that my manuscript had something worthwhile in it, but I wasn’t sure what to change. More to the point: it’s costly to submit a manuscript, especially one that just might not be ready (10 submissions at $20 each is an easy $200—a pricey lottery ticket).
My way around it: Time, venues, clarity of goal, boundaries. I pulled the manuscript (mostly) from circulation for over a year and kept working on surmounting obstacles 1-4 above. I gave myself time to figure things out. I was the one pressuring myself to get the book out there, and I didn’t need to be. I used that year to make the book stronger and to think more strategically about where to send it. I also started asking other writers about which presses they’d submitted to and what sort of responses they’d received. I started paying attention to which houses were publishing books I resonated with. I also decided that I wanted Flame Nebula published, by a reputable publisher, but didn’t necessarily need that publication to be the result of winning a contest. I built myself a short list of venues to sent the manuscript to. Next, I set a timeframe—I would only submit it over the course of one month—and a budget. Once I met the budget and/or hit the end of my timeframe, I would not be sending the manuscript out again until I had heard from all of the presses involved, or until I accepted an offer. This gave me permission to walk away from the project and focus on other things.
Ultimately, one of the presses I’d decided to submit to in the winter of 2021, Main Street Rag, picked up my manuscript. Once I received the offer, I weighed the offer against the uncertainty waiting for the results of my other submissions and ultimately accepted it. I pulled my manuscript, with thanks, from the other venues and began the process of collaboration with Main Street Rag.
Because of the long journey Flame Nebula, Bright Nova took from its initial poem to completion, I am walking away with a new way of thinking about building books of poetry. Here’s hoping that my next collection—and yours—benefits from the years of struggle.
Flame Nebula, Bright Nova is available for presale. Presale orders include a writing workshop with the author. Register here.
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