The great poet, Lucille Clifton, once said (and, of course, I’m paraphrasing) that when she thought she had a sufficient number of poems to complete a collection, she spread the poems across her floor and let them “speak with each other” and thus, her collection would be formed. I’ve always thought this sounded like an excellent idea so when, in 2022, I found myself with a substantial number of poems, I began to think about compiling them for a book-length collection. There was only one problem: how would I make a cohesive whole from a seemingly disparate and random array of writing? Spreading the poems out on the floor and urging them to have a conversation was—in my case, anyway—a complete failure and completely unavailing.
The problem would have resolved more easily if, when originally writing the individual poems, I’d had an idea, a theme, or a project in mind. I understood when I set about this new task that I had no well-thought-out and beautifully-executed motivation that readers will find in Shara McCallum’s No Ruined Stone or Diane Seuss’ Frank: Sonnets or Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise. These poets were motivated to engage their readers on a large canvas: the reframing of genealogies created by colonialism, as in McCallum’s work where she proposes an alternate account of history based on the life of poet Robert Burns who “almost” emigrated to Jamaica; the revitalization of the sonnet form in order to make meaning out of chaos of which Seuss says “ the form was a rescue raft, a lifeline, the safety net beneath the trapeze act”; and, a search for the abundance of the Harjo’s Mvskoke ancestors who suffered displacement, respectively, and of whom she writes: “[t]o the destroyers, Earth is not a person. They will want more until there is no more to steal.”
Rather, I had written the poems that ultimately comprise the collection Blue on A Blue Palette over a number of years without thought to their futures in a book or any other format. Writers don’t live in a vacuum, however, and the roughly ten-plus years during which Blue’s poems were written—and in some cases, published—were some of the most socially and politically difficult in recent memory. Humanity—whether we were writers or poets or neither—was grappling with the rise of the #MeToo movement that went viral due to several events, including the misdeeds of persons like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and the Supreme Court’s Dobbs’ decision which overthrew Roe vs. Wade’s fifty years of legal precedent. We witnessed, whether from afar or up close, the racist underpinnings that led to the murders of Black women like Breonna Taylor and Kayla Moore (to name but a few). We shrank in horror at the losses that accumulated daily during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the habitual misleading comments and gross mishandling of the event by our government in Washington. And all of the foregoing was simultaneously occurring as the planet watched the rise in sea levels negatively impact everything from food security to ecosystems and we lost countless species to incalculable wildfires and other disasters. How could we as writers give witness and voice to these and other tragedies while maintaining hope for humanity, a little grace, and forgiveness for ourselves?
It was these issues and questions that were swirling in my mind as I spread a group of approximately 150 poems across my living room carpet. As I re-read the poems, a number of themes—concerns that I’d been addressing since the publication of my first book—began to appear, the most prominent among them being the travails and joys of women, our virtues and culpability, our fears and our audacity. It seemed clear that the concerns of and regarding women would and should constitute the centerpiece of the collection, a theme I wanted to be evident to the reader within the first pages; thus, an early poem in the collection is “A Confluence of Women.” an abecedarian that begins:
always the sense we’ve assembled ourselves as
barmaids or burdens of proof,
courtesans or
drama in the style of all’s well that
ends…as long as it doesn’t end in
fine print.
But then what? From reading poets I admire—Patricia Smith, David Baker, Terrance Hayes, and Jane Hirshfield, to name just a few and egregiously omit others—I knew that a “one-note” collection would not be the most satisfying read and so I continued to consider poems that might “complicate” the manuscript.
Although never identified as a favorite or necessary color, many of the poems I was contemplating referred to or relied upon the color blue as a vessel to engage and enlarge particular poems. Initially, the inclusion was unintentional or, at least, not a conscious decision, but as I began to think about the collection more broadly, I looked for additional opportunities to reference the color by inserting it in ways that seemed intuitive and natural, as in “The Blue Haze”:
We are a slippery crew—
blue in our gyre,
blue-black like maggots
The third line of the couplet in earlier drafts was simply “black like maggots.” It seemed to me, however, that “blue-black” was a richer visual and that the line could successfully be revised to include it in a way that did no violence to my original intention.
Now the manuscript had color and a dominant theme. But what else could make it satisfying, more appealing to a broad swath of readers? What of matters more personal as well as of those more publicly shared and endured; what of the kind of experiences that braid these two concepts and which appear in the work of so many poets I admire? In the work, for example, of poet Kimiko Hahn, most particularly in her collection Foreign Bodies? The world we are currently living in provided some guidance. The impact of environmental catastrophes we are all experiencing, physically and psychically, inspired “Snow Geese in Butte”:
In the Treasure State, snow geese are no longer flying.
Gone quiet, their honks, their high-pitched quacks
lost over the toxic Berkeley Pit waters.
Simultaneously, the losses/changes to my own body inspired “Lost Sonata” where the speaker asserts:
Tonight, I am as tippery as I’ve ever been
…..
…I am as naked as the imbalance
of an electrical charge.
while the speaker also expresses her gratitude in “Say Hallelujah”:
Praise for the inhale, the ex-, little heave of chest, this too-short life.
With these considerations, the manuscript was beginning to come together as a cohesive whole. The poems did appear to be in conversation, to flow in both expected and unexpected ways, one after the other.
Of course, there were other considerations such as the ordering of the poems—always a challenge, at least for me. I wish I could report that there was some clear guidance I followed in this regard. I have found that it’s simply an exercise in experimentation until it “feels right” and then having the luck to have the eye of a gifted editor or two who can provide perspectives not previously considered. For Blue on a Blue Palette, I reflected on Ms. Clifton’s admonition, particularly her idea that the poems should be in conversation, keeping in mind that there is no one right conversation. In addition, I gave particular thought to scattering the various forms shaping some of the poems—centos, abecedarians, villanelles, etc. which rely on nursery rhymes and Bible verses, among other allusions—throughout the manuscript to create an additional throughline (symbolized by the artwork on the cover, Coded Message for a Symbiosome by Darlene Charneco) for the reader. The endless possibilities of these choices ultimately resulted in what I hope is a richly textured manuscript.
What advice can I offer to the poet seeking to stitch a manuscript into something particular when there was no initiating project? Look to this thought so beautifully expressed by Steven Sondheim in his lyrics for “Putting It Together”:
Bit by bit, putting it together
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art
Every moment makes a contribution
Every little detail plays a part…
Poet John Murillo has said of my efforts in compilation that the manuscript “is…rooted strong in a long tradition and legitimately experimental,” and that the “range in form and subject matter is equaled only by the deftness with which…each is handled.” I like to imagine that Ms. Clifton would be so proud!
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