For what feels like millennia, I have written poetry.  I studied and wrote for fifteen years with Boston-area poet, Barbara Helfgott Hyett, through classes at PoemWorks, and readings.  I attended poetry travel workshops in France, Newfoundland, and Taos, NM.  More recently I have studied with Dawn Potter from Frost Place in Franconia, NH.  I am grateful to be surrounded by a circle of poets who critique and support me as well as helping to keep me writing.

This past year I decided to focus my efforts to compile a chapbook, which felt much more do-able than the manuscript that was languishing in my computer.

What is a chapbook, you might want to know?  The dictionary says, “a small book or pamphlet, often of poetry.”  Not much more information is needed for one to understand that rather than a full-fledged manuscript of 100+ pages of poetry, a book of 25 – 30 poems is somewhat less demanding.  That said, it offers new possibilities, including a focus on a smaller range of subjects, or a crystalizing of experience within a limited number of poems.

Maine and its natural beauty is one theme I return to over and over, though it’s often a metaphor into other familiar territory for me.  Here’s a poem published in 2017 in The Maine Review:

 

Fury at the Corners of My House

Coronets of clouds, blasts

of breath raging, growling. A squall

that whites out the sea dn fields.

TV brings me news, I watch the facts.

My stone wall blurs its hard-edged

geometry. Disappeared garage doors

and the neighbor’s house.

I am afraid

of this wildness that spends itself

on itself, cannot sit still long

enough to love its own mad beauty.

I began my chapbook project at a workshop with Dawn Potter, a very fine poet from Portland ME, who also teaches at the Frost Place in Franconia, NH.  Dawn is a teacher in the best sense.  She begins from a big idea, offers examples, prompts for exploring the topic she is considering, and then giving each student time and support to realize the topic.

Her workshop – Learning from Nina Simone – was a leap.  The big idea – How an album of songs is like and unlike a chapbook of poetry.  The material used:  10 original poems of our own to create a very small chapbook.  We, her students, listened to Nina Simone’s album Little Girl Blue in various snatches.  For example, listening to first and last songs (My Baby Just Cares for Me, and Mood Indigo respectively), and thinking about the feeling of the songs, the rhythms, and words.  We talked about it to gather each other’s ideas.  Then we each chose a first and last poem of our own.  We read another student’s poems and suggested a first and last poem for them, defending our reasons in the same way we had considered Nina Simone’s ordering of songs.

Immediately, I saw!  Standing at some distance from my own work, and becoming more intimate with another’s work, I could justify not only one way of ordering, but several, and equally I could discard several poems from the first or last poem category in my tiny chapbook of 10 poems.

We went on to the middle songs (Love Me or Leave Me, and He Needs Me) in Nina Simone’s album.  What were they doing there?  Was there a shift in tone, a feeling of a turn, an arc that could be drawn from beginning to end through these middle songs.  We went back to our own 10 poems to make order mean something more than the individual poems.

What has emerged from that workshop is a book of 26 poems, entitled Want.  Here is one I published years ago, now re-titled and revised.

 

Giving Up

I cannonballed

off the side of a pool.  Run, Jump, Tuck.

But when I climbed up the ladder

to the high dive, my legs shook hard.

Tom put his hands on mine

but I said No, I won’t. I’m afraid of dying.

 He backed me down

the ladder to the concrete ground.

 

The writing is finished (if writing is ever finished).  The ordering of my poems is mostly finished.  The titles for poems, sections, and cover have been decided upon.  I even have some ideas for the cover image, as well.

Yet, getting a book published is very different process from making a book.  So stay tuned to the process of publication!  For that I will need some help.  Everyone’s advice is welcome.