I have a bad habit. Well, probably more than one, but we’re only talking about one here. If you want to talk to me about the others, take a number. The one I want to address is not a willful one, not intentional, but it happens every time I finish a book.
As soon as it’s too late to change anything about the book, I almost immediately write several poems that would have been perfect to include in the book had they only arrived a bit earlier. With Elemental, poems about nature published last year, as soon as it was too late to add more, I kept seeing new poems on every walk in the woods, every Saturday afternoon of yard work.
With An Augury of Birds, poems from my 40+ years of birdwatching, the poem “Birds Are Real,” refuting the popular “unreal” assertion that “birds aren’t real” seemed a true “V-8 moment” when it occurred to me the day before I gave my first reading from the book.
And in the case of my book of haiku, eventually, a couple of years ago, I wrote the ideal title poem for the collection just a little too late to be included in the book itself:
yellowed pages –
even words will turn to dust
eventually
I think it’s a function of projects that as soon as you have the project defined, your mind starts working on it consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and unavoidably. I suspect working on a project is one of the most motivational and inspirational tools at a writer’s disposal, which is why I tell my students and workshop attendees that as soon as you have a dozen related poems, start thinking of them as a book you’re working on, as a project. Most of us are pretty project-driven, so having a project in mind motivates us to work on it, to “get ‘er done.”
Further, once you conceive of that book project, you start consciously arranging the poems you already have into some sort of developmental sequence (narrative, logic, association, etc.) and asking yourself, “What’s missing? What do I need to write to make it all cohere, to link one to the next, fill in the gaps, make it complete?” Doing that, predictably, leads to additional poems for the project.
Somewhat less predictably, as you work on this project, you also unconsciously notice a lot more things that are related to it tend to serendipitously occur. So, you begin to believe in fate, magic, predeterminism, whatever word you choose for it. Of course, it’s not magic, it’s simply your mind paying closer attention to things related to what you’ve been thinking about, which leads to even more new poems for the project.
Finally, as you continue to produce new work related to the project, your concept of the project further coalesces, frequently helping you see how the poems you started with fit into the whole and thus how they can be revised to be even better.
It’s an organic process, and a productive one. And so I tell my students, work on a book, even if you never publish it, even if you never intend to publish it. It’s simply a good way to generate new poems and to make what you’ve already written even better.
I just recently launched my 25th book, The Song Is Why We Sing, a collection of poems about the practice of poetry. My publisher kindly permitted me to add poems to the collection as late as 2 months before its release, and I thought I was done. But then, as soon as I read through the actual book when it was released, several “perfect-fit” additional poems about writing poetry sprang to life, including the one below, which came to me when I went to post office to mail copies of the book it would have fit wonderfully in.
Wondering What Would Happen If I Answered
Honestly at the Post Office
When they ask if the package
contains anything liquid, fragile, perishable,
or potentially hazardous,
I’m never quite sure how to respond.
No liquid, to be sure.
Not particularly fragile.
Not perishable except
in the sense that everything and everyone
is ultimately, eventually perishable.
It’s the potentially hazardous part
that trips me up.
Anything, I think, can be hazardous
to someone,
in the wrong hands,
if misused.
And then, I wonder,
if they knew the truth
what would they do?
Refuse it?
Confiscate it?
Contact authorities?
If history’s records
are accurate at all,
it is, after all,
more hazardous than just
about anything else.
Neruda, Lorca, Ginsberg,
Langston Hughes, Cummings, Whitman,
McKay’s “If We Must Die,”
Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival,”
McRae’s “In Flanders Field,”
Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”
Angelou, Gorman, Hikmet, Soyinka,
Brodsky, Brecht, Oscar Wilde,
So many others imprisoned or exiled.
After a moment’s silent deliberation
I decide to take the simple route,
to let them decide,
so I finally tell them
it’s just a book of poems.
