So Jeremy threw together a manuscript. Most of the poems were good, but not all of them were. Jeremy passed the MS by an established local poet he knows, with the request that she cross out every poem she thought was not good enough. She did so. Then he showed the MS to another fine local poet, with the same request. So the winnowing was done—now what about the order? At this point Marsha stepped in. When she puts her mind to something…
Marsha went through piles of collections by respected poets to see how they assembled their books—order of poems, section breaks (if there are any), section titles, what-have-you. Then we discovered Jeffrey Levine, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at Tupelo Press. He wrote the essay about assembling a poetry manuscript. You can find it here. She studied it until she could apply what she’d read, and we re-arranged the manuscript completely. This is from Mr. Levine’s article:
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.
Of course the rejections continued to arrive. Then it occurred to Jeremy to look for a publisher who is also a poet, whose own poetry suggests to Jeremy that his might strike a chord with them. It worked—or maybe he just got lucky. We’ll never know.
“What worked for them might work for you.”—Robert Frost, in his gloomy poem Provide, Provide