I have a new microchap out from Rockwood Press. It’s called minutes between city and forest and it’s my shortest book yet. I say this because I think there is an unhelpful myth out there that poets should graduate from chapbooks to full-length collections; some manuscripts need to be small—and brevity gives poets (and readers) more room for experimentation and risk-taking than they might have in a full-sized collection. As a case in point, this is also my first speculative book (it’s a series of prose poem encounters with angels and other wildlife) and it matured into a microchap after a wild adolescent phase as a 20-page chapbook.

Every manuscript I put together teaches me more about how manuscripts work. This one, because of its speculative elements, reminded me that putting together a collection is an act of world-building. A collection, whatever its size, is an environment that holds all the individual poems together; there has to be some unity to that environment—and also some variety (the poems can’t all occupy the same niche). I like the analogy of houses in a neighborhood (not a cookie-cutter suburb); the houses might all be different sizes/shapes/colors/architectural styles, but they will all suit the local environment (hopefully) and co-create a general “feel” in the neighborhood. We could also think of individual poems as organs in a body.

The world-building that poets do is usually more intuitive/implicit than that done by science-fiction writers. It also typically happens later in the process, once we’ve written a few poems to help us sound the edges of our manuscript/world. That said, I find immense value in taking some time to recognize and lay down some groundwork for a manuscript’s atmosphere. My manuscript coaching includes questions to help writers lay parameters for the world of the manuscript and describe its environment. I coach myself with these same questions because this kind of world-building helps me make clear decisions about which poems to include (and which to cut), how to revise individual poems so that they can interact more dynamically in the world of the manuscript, and even what kinds of forms and structures will best hold the world together.

For instance, understanding that the world of minutes was humid (thick with weather, exhaust, and unspoken political fractures) prompted me to cut all of the lineated experiments (which were in danger of getting a bit ethereal and abstract) and stick with prose poems (where sentences and attention to landscape could help ground the angels). I also decided to stay in the first-person plural to capture the fraught entanglement of the community visited by the angels (a choice that might have been claustrophobic or limiting in a longer project). These decisions (and a timely nudge from a contest with a 10-page limit) helped me tighten the manuscript into its final microchap form.

My friend and co-conspirator Virginia Hoffman drew a strange and amazing creature for the cover. Eric Muhr and Rockwood Press worked further magic by printing the poems on archive quality paper (probably the nicest paper my words will ever be printed on). I love it when a book also gets to be a beautiful object. You can find it here.

Wishing you all the good stuff this summer,

Ceridwen

P.S. I’ll be teaching a virtual workshop at The Muse on August 1^st. “Let’s Get This Poem Started” will consider a range of possibilities and strategies for launching a poem. You can use code LAUNCH for 35% off.