Looking at a variety of poetry collections can be useful when it comes time to assemble your own. Many are thematic like Stag’s Leap, by Sharon Olds, which focuses on the years before and after the poet’s divorce following a thirty-year marriage. Others tell a story, such as Ann Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Illya Kominsky’s Deaf Republic. Less common today are those that concentrate on formal poetic forms, such as Dana Gioia’s 99 Poems: New and Selected. There are countless ways a collection can coalesce, and a strong vision combined with other factors can help to make it shine.

The poetry of Frank O’Hara has a distinctive voice that’s conversational in tone. One of the things that makes his Lunch Poems so effective is that it combines voice with theme. These pieces were written when O’Hara was on lunch break from his job at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and have a spur-of-the-moment quality that evokes the pace of city life. Like the poems themselves, the collection comes across as spontaneous with a lively mix of topics and emotional content.  

A distinguishing facet of Lucille Clifton’s poetry is its visual appeal. Reviewer Peggy Rosenthal wrote of Clifton’s work that, “The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, becoming a shaping presence as much as the words themselves.” Visual appeal is closely related to voice, and when these two qualities are combined with strong themes, as they are in Clifton’s Blessing of the Boats, New & Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (winner of the National Book Award), the result can be unforgettable.        

Lyric ordering is another way to enhance cohesion. With this approach, each poem is linked to the previous one in some way, for instance, by imagery or repeated words or phrases. An alternative approach is to place “hinge” poems at the close of each section and the beginning of the next one to guide the reader from one section to the next.

Editing

The conventional wisdom is to begin the editing process after you’ve finished your first draft. But editing a poetry collection is different from editing the draft of a novel, say. I find it to be an ongoing process from start to finish, of writing, revising, and editing. Whatever your method is, when you get to the point that the manuscript feels complete, it’s advisable to let it sit for several days, or even weeks. Then, you’ll be able to give it a final edit with fresh eyes. At that point, it may seem that you’re looking at someone else’s work, a huge advantage because you won’t be blinded by attachment it. 

A final edit can reveal some surprising oversights. It might be a wordy poem that could be tightened up or one that needs to be reformatted, or tweaked. It might be a repeated misspelling or that fact that you used a certain word too many times. (This is where spellcheck and the search function come in handy.) Even if you’ve never been a particularly good judge of your own work, you may find that your editorial eye has become hawk-like, zooming in on a misplaced modifier or a less than effective image. You may also get a sense for what ails the manuscript. Poet and editor April Osserman, who served as Executive Director for Alice James Books, points out that one of the hardest tasks for a poet who’s assembling a collection is to let go of those pieces that aren’t “book strong” or those that “don’t fit the major or minor themes of the book.”  Save those for another project, she recommends in her article, “Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript,” March/April 2011 (www.https:pw.org).  

It’s advisable to look closely at your first and last poems, too. Does the first poem set the right tone? Is it one of your stronger poems? Does the last poem in that section foreshadow the next section? If not, is the transition effective as is? Re-examine key poems and those around them; do they expand on your vision or “talk” to each other? Then read through them sequentially. If there’s a narrative line, does it carry the reader in an engaging way from point A to point B?  Does the last poem in the collection reiterate your vision while adding something new?  Last, if you haven’t been doing this all along, you’ll want to read the poems out loud to yourself. How do they sound? What do you notice about reading them out loud versus reading them silently? What would you change?

Selecting a Title

It’s not absolutely necessary to have a working title, but it can help as a kind of stabilizing force around which the poems revolve. As the project moves along, you may come up with alternative titles, some better, some worse, and the right one may not appear until the last moment. You may hear it from a trusted reader or editor who points out that a little noticed phrase in one of your poems might be the one. Or you might compose a new poem that introduces it. One way or another it will show up.

Some questions to ask when deciding on a title:

• does it reflect your vision?
• is it memorable?
• is it original?
• does it invite the reader in?
• does it resonate with the style or voice of the poems? 
• is it intriguing, or even mysterious?

Sometimes a prospective title just needs a twist, a little something extra to make it stand out. Try switching out a lackluster word or adding a verb to give it action. Rearrange the word order, adding other words to the mix if necessary and see what comes up. Consider making a list of your favorite titles, whether or not they’re poetry collections. Here are a few of my favorites: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, Bright Dead Things, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, Petals of the Moon. Some titles emphasize verbs or verb forms, such as Trainspotting, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, and If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun. At thirteen words, this last one definitely gets my attention.