On Arrangement
1.
My first major critical feat? A long paper, in college, on structure and sequence in Charles Simic’s Austerities (1982). The professor read a draft. “It’s just describing the arrangement,” she said. “It isn’t making any critical claims.” In lieu of a revision, I taped a crutch covered with critical claims to her office door. Like the gentleman’s C, there’s also the petulant poet’s A.
Structure and sequence in collections of poetry remain some of my chief “critical interests.” I’d always prefer to talk about a group of poems — the higher the pile the better — than to feel my mouth, despite itself, shape the questions that habitually crop up in discussions of single poems. “Is the ending working?” “Should that be a comma?” Looking at a larger set, we see the bigger questions. They can frame our thinking about endings and commas.
I came to that poetry class as a recovering philosophy major. I was tired of argument, of knowing. That explains my preference for description, rather than claims — that is, for the insights that might emerge, without resolving into argument, through close looking, through presence. We could hold, and be held by, positions that wouldn’t fly in philosophy. Our dearest experiences, after all, might have fallacies, and folly, at their core.
On one hand, it seems a little on the nose — and adolescent, obnoxious — to have submitted a literal critical crutch. But in my defense, I didn’t think of that symbolism at the time. I’d recently broken my leg, so I had a crutch. It was just around, like Simic’s book had been, like the quotations I wrote on it. My gesture, as I meant it, was that all these materials — crutch, tape, quotations, book, office door, me — weren’t points in an argument. They were parts of a world.
The professor would have been correct to say that my artist’s statement needed work.
*
Discussions of single poems, in a conventional poetry workshop, often presume intentionality and argument. The poet, it’s supposed, has made an intentional argument with each compositional choice. They intend to intentionally improve that argument, thanks to their peers’ arguments about the poem. That will help the poem become more intentional. Did your first draft have some incidental rhyme? You could turn that up, in revision.
On the other hand, another member of the workshop will say, you could get rid of it.
Or, says another, you could format the poem so it’s shaped like a cat, because I love cats …
(The key principle of creative writing pedagogy, a colleague once said, is that this way is north — unless this other way is.)
The discussion of individual poems can be especially good for intentions (“is that supposed to be the same ‘she’ as before?”) and argument (“what do you mean by ‘nuts are money’?”). But those ways of reading can polish away essential frictions. We tidy the wires, and we lose the sparks. The experiential meanings of the poem — not the propositional or analytical ones — may depend on a confusion of pronouns or on a wild statement that’s a hard nut to cash in on.
*
A group of readers recently talked about my poem “Rust Honey.” It extends from my experience, as a child, of seeing a house on fire in our neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan. It ends with a vision of running for help with my father: “Tenderly, though, his running desperate, / yet matching his steps to the child’s. / A sweet smell in the tetanus.”
In terms of narrative’s good intentions, as these well-intentioned readers observed, it’s important that we had been in a car when the poem began. The final sprint—heroic, in its way, though likely inconsequential — was also a slower one. Valor is often inefficient. And yet, we proceeded together, though that slowed my father’s strides even more. These lines, they said, bring to mind the alignments and limitations of family, of keeping pace, as best we can, among emergencies. There’s desperation, which gets tempered by responsibility. That makes it more desperate, in its quietness and honor and restraint. Narrative, theme, message: the group’s conversation put it together.
But what’s up with “a sweet smell in the tetanus”? The true answer is that, as a child running around that neighborhood, past its shuttered factories and the evergreens by the railroad tracks, I’d been told to watch out for rusty nails. “Running,” in the poem, had that memory in it. And, while I was writing, I liked how “tenderly” and “tetanus” framed those lines, the bookends of the “te”-words. Also, I liked the sonic chime between “desperate” and “tetanus.” That effect was heightened by the editor who accepted the poem for publication, the poet and essayist Brian Blanchfield. I’d originally had “his running desperately.” Brian suggested the truncated hitch of “desperate.”
So, the final phrase emerged from an embedded association, visual symmetry, and sound, with the help of an editor—a chord based in aesthetic intuitions, not propositional intent. It matters, of course, that Brian and I have both devoted many hours to our intuitions about poetry. When I say that I liked the look of the words, I liked the sound, when Brian said he might like it more a little tighter, our pleasure—or anyone’s, in discussing a poem — is no more arbitrary than an engineer who says they’d like the bridge to be a little higher. Aesthetics are pragmatic. They make the world.
But I’d be hard-pressed to explain the propositional meaning of “a sweet smell in the tetanus.” Perhaps, it represents an everyday danger, in contrast with the fire? A conventional workshop might recommend that I revise the line for narrative or thematic legibility. But I wanted the phrase to feel like a pang, sharp and sweet and opening wildly out, as though into the years that followed. A tinge, ashes and sunsets. You see the figure emerge from the fire and utter a prophetic fragment. It may become true, in time. For now, we see the figure. Smell the singe on their breath. Of moss and nests in chimneys.
All of that is easier to consider in a set of poems. Does the poet habitually veer from specific memory to more jagged perceptions? Do they sometimes begin a poem with that kind of flinging, rather than ending there? How do we read this poem differently if the next poem focuses on family, or landscape, or research into rust? It might seem like these are questions for a later stage, for assembling a book. But you can ask them of poems at any point. You could ask them of someone’s first two poems. Or after the very first one: what might come next?
*
I’m looking at Sara Nicholson’s newest book, April (The Song Cave, 2023). Its poems are far from the author’s very first, but the book shows how two poems can propel a collection. We begin with “What I Said, Where I Said It, and Why,” a riff, which might bring Merwin to mind, on a shifting and eternal “it.” The poem starts from infinitives, invoking muses and their absence, which we might step into:
To hear myself say it
To listen to myself saying it to you
Who listen, to them or who
Cares why I said it
That I said it for a reason
Or not, to you or not to you
Nicholson considers the provenance and chain of custody of this “it” (“Did Helen say it to Clytemnestra. / Did Laura Riding / Overhear her say it to me”), and concludes with a turn toward poetry itself: “Are there any good poems / About saying it. / If you find one let me know.”
Because it comes first, the poem welcomes us to the work in Nicholson’s collection. But its gesture also turns toward other poems, poems the reader might know, poems that, necessarily, are not the poems we are about to read. Many poems end with an offering; this poem concludes with a receptive request.
The book’s second poem, “Weather Talk,” begins in a similar posture, of listening into a potential idea. And then Nicholson’s next lines launch; the book’s first two poems establish the combination of intent listening and lush velocity that one sees throughout the collection. These are poems that can be both eloquent and hospitably ambivalent:
Something about the music grief is
Either prey to or heir to
Falls flat, the same ways art is
Subject to its objects: larks & light
On a table, the pink green
Breezes through all August long
The poem ends in abundance, with “I” in “the plural form” calling forth “Time, pain, grief, joy, energy / And entropy, all the state / Flowers: red, gold, purple, white.” Taken together, these poems raise questions that are key to the book: What do we offer, and what do we seek to receive? How does receptivity at once include lack (we need something) and robustness (there’s so much we can see and say)?
*
I arrived at graduate school firmly on the side of feeling over thinking, or of feeling as thinking. It’s possible I wasn’t very good at thinking, and poetry had provided an easement into intelligence. I might have agreed too heartily with Keats that “I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning,” or with Roethke that “we think by feeling. What is there to know?” Poetry gave me logics that were affective, associative, metaphorical, linguistic, material, alive to mixed emotions. Its patterns brought me toward things like thoughts. Its thinking wasn’t narrowly systematic. It was systemic.
And it was in the air, this uncertainty about thinking. On my housemates’ shelves, I could find philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, on affective reasoning, and Antonio Damasio, on the neuroscience of thinking and feeling. They sat beside Lyn Hejinian’s The Language of Inquiry and Charles Bernstein’s Poetics and Nathaniel Mackey’s Paracritical Hinge. Ten years earlier, or in a different setting, critical poetics might have seemed at odds with effusive emotion. Such postmodern theory might have preferred to focus on language in isolation, or culture, or whatever. But we were in an era of “hybridity,” and we were increasingly suspicious of theories that left out the body. Wind on my face — so I have a face. We spin to find where we are. We leap and are brought to earth. We la la la until we lamb, landscape, language. “Touch me, remind me who I am,” went a poem I read at some weddings in those years.
The meanings that would come from this spinning, this thinking through the senses, I was sure, would be more significant. They would go beyond what I knew how to say. That would expand my thinking. Putting things into words was the least we could do.
In Thinking with Literature, Terence Cave explores how writing can foreground “what the human mind does best,” its gifts for “cognitive fluidity, the tangled connectivity and capacity for improvisation that enable it to engage in the world in ‘decoupled’ mode.” Argument, in a strict sense, can insist on coupling: language coupled to meaning, speakers coupled to messages. The goal can be to reduce the “tangled connectivity” that emerges from a work’s leaps and lulls, or to corral it into well-kept premises, bolstered and pruned. In considering entire books, we focus on the tangles, the connections and contradictions. It multiples our vantages. Blink, and there’s another poem. Another world. The book is the world these worlds reveal. I could make a claim about it, but I would rather describe the claim it makes on me. Tell me what you see.
*
Despite the centrality of selection and sequence to every book of poems, the topic has seldom been addressed in essays on poetic craft. That might reflect an abiding emphasis on the hit songs of single poems or that fact that, however you stack up a group of poems, readers can find meaningful patterns — whether or not they read the book from start to finish.
But the works on the topic have been significant. Natasha Sajé’s 2005 essay “Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems” considers the gestures made by a book’s organization, how, in a phrase from G.C. Waldrep, a book can “mark out a larger universe than the poems themselves do.” Sajé sets out to “trace my reading of conventions that apply to the structure of books of poetry in an attempt to discover how they carry me over the threshold (or not) into bliss.” This emphasis — critical bliss! — is thrilling. It insists that reading requires what Keats called a “greeting of the spirit.” No tears in the reader, no crying about the text.
It makes sense that another important tome on the topic, Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems (CSU Poetry Center, 2006), edited by Susan Grimm, appeared around the same time as “Dynamic Design.” By 2006, poetry manuscript contests, with publication at their prize, had proliferated. But we hadn’t yet seen the small press bonanza that came shortly after, when publishing’s technologies got more affordable. So, poets who had succeeded in contests, and the editors who coordinated them, could advertise uncommon professional knowledge. That met an increasing interest in the professionalization of creative writing — through graduate programs, conferences — and a hunger for tips and tricks about publication. At the same time, there was increasing attention to the book — that is, to the dynamics of the overall text—as an aesthetic unit. Works such as Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Cole Swensen’s The Book of a Hundred Hands (2005), and Louise Gluck’s Averno (2006) emphasized the book or sequence. That emphasis, long vital to modernist and postmodern poetics, influenced collections of more discrete and conventional lyrics, whether poets hoped to stand out from the slush or to treat each book as a “project.”
The essays in Grimm’s volume, by poets including Wanda Coleman, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, and Carolyne Wright, explore the connections between making a book and making a life. As Grimm notes, “The reader learns not only how a poet thinks when putting together a collection but also what happens when being a poet intersects with time and livelihood.” The book is part of a larger volume.
*
I appreciate Grimm’s phrasing: “how a poet thinks when.” The thinking happens during. The thinking happens through. Arrangement, as Clark Coolidge noted in a lecture, contains “range.” He prefers “arrangement” to “composition” or “structure.” “You’re dealing with words,” he said, “one word at a time, with all the circuits that are in your mind, with all the things that impinge on you. How do you put them all together.”
If the materials are given — a crutch, a glimpse, a phrase, a father — with no lack of items to draw from, the question is about assembly. Speech, Heidegger suggests, is a way of gathering things up; poetry is the art of that gathering, of what we select and retain. We think when we’re trying to put it all together. That thinking isn’t an idea that settles the question. It arrives in the trying, which, most often, means “in the failing.” A book shows that effort to gather, and it suggests the further gatherings — a reading, a discussion, a next collection — that might prove to be what the book is most enduringly “about.”
*
But maybe the first step is to feel as though there’s “no lack of items to draw from.” I remember Denis Johnson, addressing a group of graduate students in his purple suit, remarking that whenever he was writing a novel, he knew there’d be a point when everything applied. He’d go to the grocery store for orange juice, and he knew he’d see an image or situation that would be the exact right next thing for his novel. That doesn’t mean he poured everything directly from the check-out’s conveyor to the page, or that he was always in this state, but that, at times, he could dependably see “everything” in terms of a novel. He wasn’t seeing, and then selecting, and then arranging. His seeing was selecting and arranging.
I remember, playing video games as a child, my disappointment that you couldn’t interact with everything. Every door should open. At times, in writing, when you have the questions right, when you’ve prepared sufficiently, they can.
*
The connections between lives and books are even deeper in Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, 2023), a new collection edited by Sarah Giragosian and Virginia Konchan. It should be required reading for graduate students in creative writing, and it will be invaluable to poets who are writing or revising a manuscript. Its essays, by an “eclectic contingent of poet-contributors” including Victoria Chang, Annie Finch, Philip Metres, and Diane Seuss, highlight the contributors’ “articulated experiential wisdom.” The essays comprise “lyric, scholarly, teacherly, documentary, autobiographical, and epistolary modes,” as the editors note. In “Dynamic Design,” Sajé sought, taking a phrase from Roland Barthes, to “bring to a crisis [her] relation with language” by considering how books move their readers. In Marbles on the Floor, many of the essays focus, instead, on how writers’ lives move through and around their books. In Diane Seuss’s “Restless Herd,” for example, we learn about the author’s books in terms of her life — as a mother, a social worker, a poet who published her first collection at forty-two. Seuss begins with her childhood hobby of arranging statues of horses: “Together, the sum of the separate entities was more than its parts. On each was tied an invisible rope that tethered them to the word horse, to the idea of horse, and to horse galloping through imagination’s realm.” The titles of her manuscripts, she says, are comparably tethered to each book’s poems, and she connects her “horse statue instinct” to Emily Dickinson’s “herbarium instinct.” Seuss speculates about Dickinson’s hand-stitched collections of plants and poems:
“Maybe arranging the poems in groups, stabbing, and sewing them, gave her a hint of the feeling of completion that publishing a book might have provided. Was she imagining future readers? Did this poet who sometimes supplied variants of words within the poems themselves, who sought serendipity, who allowed for triple meanings and cross-purposes, leave breadcrumbs for us to follow into just how experimental, enigmatic, and fluid a book’s order might be? Might your book’s arrangement, taken far enough, be you?”
*
Marbles on the Floor showcases the correspondences between “the process of realizing the poetry collection and actualizing the self-as-poet,” as Giragosian and Konchan note, through focusing on a manuscript’s “complex ecosystem.” But the book doesn’t neglect specific craft. The “anthology’s very ethos,” according to the editors, reflects contributor Alyse Knoff’s remark that “most poets do know what we’re doing, but not always how or why we’re doing it.” The specifics of craft, in other words, are more of a what than a how or a why, a set of behaviors more than an explanation or a rationale. They’re inseparable from “the poet’s process of self-creation.”
What I want from discussions of craft: an understanding of that what. This is what I did. Maybe I shouldn’t have, and maybe it shouldn’t have worked, and maybe I often doubted myself. Maybe the doubts were myself. But now I’ll try to describe the what. It will tell you how I lived. It could tell you why.
“You’ll never catch a fish that way,” Robert Hass writes in “Berkeley Eclogue.” He’s talking about fishing with his sons. The next phrase: “One caught a fish that way.”
2.
An analogy is common: the poems in a collection are to the book as the lines in a poem are to the poem. As the words in a line are to the line. As the intuitions and intentions behind or within each word are to each word.
In a collection of twenty-four poems, the twenty-fifth poem is the book itself, Robert Frost is said to have said. (It seems like James Wright might be the source of that oft-quoted remark, citing Frost in an interview.)
Each word, line, and poem is particular, substantive, irreducible. But they also contribute to a larger sense. That happens through arrangement, even if that arrangement is governed by a linear narrative or programmatic structure. So, it makes sense that poets who favor the overall effects of arrangement might write poems that foreground arrangement itself, poems that highlight how impressions, images, and phrases can combine. The impression of each poem, that is, might arrive through arrangement, in ways that match our impression of the book. Conversely, once we’re thinking about the book overall, any individual element of a poem can stand alone more distinctly.
A phrase like “a sweet smell in the tetanus” might be establishing an echo or motif with phrases that are pages away. Or it might be clanging, disjointed, in the same way that other fragments will clang. Or it might just be itself. We’ll have to see.
This notion of composition as arrangement recalls Jack Spicer’s idea that writing is comparable to rearranging the provided “furniture” at hand. “If a Martian comes into a room and sees a baby’s alphabet blocks, he’ll obviously use them to communicate,” Spicer says. “He won’t understand what they’re for or anything else. He’ll simply arrange them into an order that makes very good sense Martian-wise, and doesn’t too much Earthman-wise, and he’ll just use them.”
These Martian dynamics underlie composition, even if we know the letters on the blocks. We’re trying to put something together. When I gesture like this, when I say this word, when I surround it with these other words, you understand the words are humming differently. Poetry creates an instrument for humming differently.
*
After I published my first book, Full Catastrophe Living (University of Iowa, 2009), I wanted my next book to be a masterpiece. I made a pile of the poems that would go into it, my monument, and I made a pile of the discards. Scrap, compost, failed attempts, gristle. You won’t be surprised that, as a whole, the perfect poems felt airless, embarrassingly and wrongly ambitious, insecure, despite their illustrious publication history in institutional journals edited by some of the most renowned graduate students of that year.
But the discards? They held together, in ways I couldn’t have predicted. I sorted that pile, substantially higher, into two groups. They became Annulments (Center for Literary Publishing, 2010) and The Firestorm (CSU Poetry Center, 2011). The masterpiece never had a chance.
*
I wrote my next book, Century Swept Brutal (Black Ocean, 2014) straight through. I thought of it as a performance, in a pressurized week. Let’s keep the dance marathon going. I was staying with friends in a cabin. We wrote all day, grilled at night. A few pages in, I made a kind of joke I typically wouldn’t have made in a poem — I was trying to be a serious poet, after all. But I left it in. I shaped the next poems around it. The dancer slips, and slipping becomes the dance. Miles Davis: “If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play that determines if it’s good or bad.”
It’s also arranging, to compose straight through.
It took me a long time to accept that Century Swept Brutal might be a good book, even though I wrote it quickly.
Of course, no book is written quickly. When I read it now, I see images and phrases that come from my earliest memories.
I was simultaneously working (overworking?) material that would become The Orchard Green and Every Color(Omnidawn, 2016). I dreamt the title in 2009. I used it as a tuning fork, seeing what could hold its tone. Seven years later, and after much editorial help from Rusty Morrison at Omnidawn and many friends, the book appeared.
Two things are true: it was my sixth book in seven years. And I wrote it at the pace of about thirty-four words per month.
The discard pile completed the masterpiece, which I then discarded. The straight-through performance of Century Swept Brutal complemented the labor of The Orchard Green. Each needed the other. If you’re working by arrangement, thinking by making, feeling your way through, it might help to have multiple projects at once, with different paces, methods, limits.
I come back to the jigsaw puzzle on the porch, after staring for an hour at the jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. I try a piece in the same place I tried it a few days before. It fits. The colors change around it.
*
“Call me ‘Man Trying to Unlock Door with Varied Objects,’” I wrote in that first book.
Often, in terms of arrangement in a manuscript, the lock turned after I landed on a simple rule, more hammer than jeweler’s kit: in Annulments, for example, it came together when I realized that the book’s long poem shouldn’t come last but at the beginning, preceded by the foothills of three prefatory poems.
*
The essays in Marbles on the Floor are themselves affectingly arranged. The final four pieces begin with Philip Metres’ “Dreaming the Total Poem, Assembling the Counterarchive, Writing the Refuge.” Metres suggests that books, including, by implication, this anthology itself, can serve as a vital “counterarchive” for “creating a momentary refuge in the chaos and beautiful trouble of living.” We then move from the open-letter of its charge to three pieces that are epistolary in other senses. Kazim Ali’s “Dear Unexplainable” addresses a void, exploring how poetry can emerge from the seemingly indistinct or incomprehensible (“My real degree was in wandering”), Cyrus Cassells’ “Mystery and Legacy in Shaping a Manuscript” addresses a past self (“I find my poetry is consistently two years ahead of my day-to-day self”), and Victoria Chang’s “Of Bonsais and Moons” addresses the reader directly. The collection opens outward; the “counterarchive,” this movement suggests, will be made through our exchanges.
The final word? It’s Chang’s: “You just have to start trying, to get on your knees and shuffle the poems around, as if praying. Because in the end, so much about poetry is about faith.”
The volume’s introduction began with style (“Style in poetry is hard to pin down”). In the end, we understand that style, like arrangement, has a lot riding on it.
*
I’m still interested in what one can’t express as an argument, even or especially when our feelings are clear. And I’m interested in how arrangement shows our motives. You can tell when someone has tried to get the decorations right. That isn’t just about decoration. What motivates that fiddling, that need to try to pressurize connections? It often reveals ranges of feeling that would be hard to say straight.
Julie Carr’s excellent critical study Surface Tension offers another way to think about what we make through arrangement. Surface tension, she notes, describes “the effect of molecular bonding at the surface of a liquid. By virtue of being on top, these molecules have fewer molecules with which to bond, thus the energetic bonds between them are stronger than they would otherwise be. I use this metaphor because in the poems I examine a similar bonding effect occurs.” These effects create “the sense that the thickened surface is distinct from, and perhaps in the way of, the poem’s actual content. However, to return to physics, when a fluid demonstrates surface tension, one need only to pierce the surface to discover that the difference between surface and depth is an illusion; the two are molecularly (though not energetically) identical.”
We feel the tensions by which arrangement offers itself. The feeling is physical; sense is sensation. We think through it. Like a nest held together by the action of the birds moving within it.
*
When I felt I wasn’t thinking, in my twenties, I was finding ways to think in the ways I preferred. Is that the definition of being close-minded? Perhaps. But it felt like a way of preserving, or protecting, the patterns my mind needed, so that it could take more in. Don’t just repeat. Turn things around. Find a place for them. Listen.
So, I resisted “training” my thoughts.
I preferred “training” in the sense of an eye that is educated, to see in particular ways — this is the Baroque, this is the bereft — which it can then shift among. And in the sense of an eye that is focused, trained on what it sees. It doesn’t mean that what we see is fixed.
*
I recently reread Simic’s Austerities for the first time since my failed paper, two decades ago. The book is in three sections, each with 13 poems. I remember my rhapsodic descriptions of parallels between the first poem in the first section, “History,” with its “gray evening / Of a gray century,” and the first poem of the second section, “The Work of Shading,” with its “rain the color of pencil-lead.” That poem’s classroom is echoed in the first poem in the third section, “Drawing a Triangle.” Amazing! Also, “shading” and “drawing” — could the connections be more profound, more brilliant, more obvious, dear Professor?
I have no idea what I thought I saw.