Amazement

Or, How I Wrote and then Rewrote a Book of Poems

This essay was originally published February 23rd 2024 by

Thomas J Bevan

on the

Soaring Twenties

newsletter. Thanks to Thomas and the whole STSC criminal empire.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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Just one second while I tell you a story.

On the last day of January, I pressed print on a 76-page PDF, the first time I had done so in almost 10 years.

The printer settings were set to draft: two-sided, black ink.  The printer did not ponder over the pages, but sent them rocketing from its belly.  The pages had a title page, an epigraph, and 35 poems broken up into 7 sections.  Only 5 poems had a first draft date within the last 10 years — one poem is old enough to vote.  Maybe half of them have been printed in journals, some online and lucky if the website is still active.  The language used in these poems seems archaic now — pronouns such as “Abu Graib” and “Petraeus”, and catchwords like “surge”.  

The epigraph is the same. Three lines from Henry IV part 1:

Come wilt thou see me ride?

And when I am on horseback I will swear

I love thee infinitely.

sets the tone of a manuscript I had first completed in 2012, which I dubbed American Step & Wave, based off one of the longer lodestone poems that was published by the New Orleans Review in 2015.  The title has the bombast of a young poet handed his M.F.A. and only partly deserving it.  It had no sections, and more poems.  The poems were put together in a theme involving appropriation, odyssey, and home.  This new draft does not have that title.

When I pressed print, almost a month ago now, I tried to recall what feelings I might have had when I had first printed it, almost twelve years ago, in preparation for my thesis defense.  Likely a smug satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment.  This time, there wasn’t so much satisfaction as there was amazement.

I would like to tell you about that AMAZEMENT.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

The short story between those two printings is tediously long, and so very common.  I leave it as lacuna.

How I come to AMAZEMENT is first through total ignorance, and twelve years ago I was too full of myself to consider myself ignorant. But between 2012 and 2020 I lost my ability to think of poems as a collection.  I won’t get into it, other than to say it involved publishing a chapbook-length poem, and the rigamarole I learned about publishing and publishers.  It involved how much the MS I had printed out as my thesis took on dust while I casually threw it at submission managers, helping fill the coffers of literary presses by paying the fees for numerous book awards.  Every so often I would try to work on the MS anew, but the structure of it began to dissolve.  I didn’t know where to start.  By 2016 — especially 2016 — the themes felt archaic.  I began to wonder how you even MAKE a collection.

Think about it. Take a poem and set it next to another poem. What connects them? An image, a word? Is it the prosody? Or is their difference so blistering that the shock provides a dissonance that is entrancing? What happens now, when a third poem is set to the second? And a fourth? A fifth? ( You’re getting the idea. ) Does the ordering of consecutive poems itself make a collection? If one is put out of order, does it fall apart?

And then, the reader. Because a collection isn’t for the poet. I don’t think the poet needs any of their work put together that way. A poem is for the poet, something they need to strangle out into the world. A collection of poems is a curation meant to express to a reader something about the poet, the world, history, politics, form, etc. So getting the reader, some Other that will pick up what you’re putting down, how to get the reader from beginning to end, to realize the experience you’re curating from cover to cover? It recalls Dan Beachy-Quick and his opening lines of Spell —

                         Sir, turn
This page and the thick door opens
By growing thinner, ever thinner,
Until the last page turns and is turned
Into air.

What I had lost was the desire to curate my poems, to put them together and move ideas from one side of the door to the other. And without the end product — a book — in mind, I found it impossible to write.  Mornings went by as I stared mournfully at a blank page, and the printed pages cluttering my desk became just that.

What became rebuilding

In 2021 I began running this sonnet series that is nearing its 100th sonnet. I began it because I wanted to stop writing into a vacuum. Because a writer who is not writing is a lunatic. Because I didn’t have to think about continuity, which was good since I had lost my ability to think of my poems as connected toward something like a collection. There’s something to self-publishing : not a means to an end but an outlet for work to be produced and forgotten. My friends would say that I was building a collection I could one day publish as a whole, but I knew better. I had read Terrance Hayes and Diane Seuss, hell I had read William Shakespeare. I knew a collection of sonnets was not a collection so much as a long-form poem. That was not what my sonnets were.

But I was starting from scratch. Without a book to think about, I focused on writing a sonnet every week — not an easy task. I read poetry collections and marveled at how they were structured. I let the ground shift beneath me.

I carried on in this manner for two whole years.  It was inspirational, and if the content above has spoken to you, I suggest you try it as well. It helped me build a community, helped me to think and explore. As I searched for inspiration for my poems, I turned back to critical essays I had only casually read in college. There were pathways of literature I had never considered, I began to take them. I discovered in my sonnets a crown, based off a memory that became my obsession for half a year. I attended workshops about writing books, and read essays of other poets and how they curated their poems.

Gathering strength, I decided to try again.

What comes next here is a step-by-step, it may behoove you to skim.

Just don’t skim too quick.

Last June I opened a new file tree¹ and began collecting poems. I nixed the old title of the MS and kept it blank, waiting to hear it call out.

The first problem was of the past.  A collection of poems needs to withstand the years.  In my earlier MS, the political catchphrases were accepted as cachet, but ten years had gone by (and more).  

I began with a single poem, chosen to be the first poem. It was chosen for its archaisms, and I sculpted it around the other themes I had in mind for the book. This was the beginning of my AMAZMENT, since the poem had never been a particular favorite and certainly never felt like an opener. But it anchored the collection. It drew a line where the other poems stood. It was in the style of the Montana poet Richard Hugo ( the title itself references a book of his ) and declared itself in that style that a structure is instantly created. That poem became the door that opens.

Once the first poem was decided on, gathering the other poems into place was an easier task. I put them all into the file free and began sorting through.  At first I was indulgent, reading many ( many! ) old poems and liberal about including them.  I overwhelmed the collection with sluff, poems that had nothing in common with my themes, poems that had been given one draft and forgotten, poems that sucked.  Then I started sorting through them, feeling how they worked together from the anchor-piece, dropping them up and down the file tree, or removing them entirely.  This took days.  It felt homebrewed, like I was creating a recipe for this obsession.  It also was hopeful, since the poems that stayed were mostly the poems that had been in the MS for the last ten years, which proved I had been on the right track.  One poem I removed I was shocked to do so.  It had been my anchor-poem for the MS since 2012, and one of my favorites.  Yet I found it didn’t fit if it wasn’t the opening poem, and it wasn’t strong enough to hold all the themes I wanted.  So out it went.

Then I sorted the poems into sections.  These sections served a purpose of separating the past into eras.  Sections are crude, I do not recommend them. But old things are crude, and this MS was old.  I went from the first section (containing only one poem) to the last (six), adding/removing poems, then working on the poems individually.  It felt as if I was taking a wrinkled linen sheet and smoothing it out with an iron, inch by inch.  The months went by as I worked my way down the file tree, sometimes turning back and reworking.  My AMAZEMENT continued.  Whatever the cost of it, it felt like the best work I had ever done.  It felt mature, purposeful.  I kept at it, disregarding my other projects and at the expense of my sonnet series ( oh how the quality has suffered! ).

I made it to the last poem in mid-January of this year.  I had begun reworking the MS seven months before.  Some poems needed no work at all, some had to be rewritten in a completely new direction.  I had to eke out a sestina ( I hate sestinas ) because as Stephen Sondheim said, “content dictates form”.  One morning I looked at the file tree, and I flipped through each poem, making notes and adjustments, and I said to myself, This is it.  PRINT.

So here I am.

Years and years ago, a friend of mine said laughingly, “picture it, James.  I am writing the most important work that has ever been written in the history of literature.  So I believe.  And there you are, writing the most important work that has ever been written in the history of literature.  So you believe.  And we are all here, us writers, swept up in our obsessions, our biggest fans, knowing that we are working on something invaluable.  We have the best work we know, now if only the rest of the world take a beat fucking notice.”  He howled over the irony, and left me chagrined.  

The only real thing we have is our obsession.  We may have an audience, we might even have awards and incomes, grants, fellowships.  We might find our writing “successful”.  But it means nothing without that first obsession, if we don’t place the work on the altar and bow to it, sacrificing the hours of our lives to it.  And I don’t believe it is easy.  Because obsession wanes, subject matter changes, we change.  What I printed out I want to be done with.  I want it published so I can move on. It is curated, it is a part of me, it speaks to something important for me, it deserves to be read.  But it won’t be published if I am careless about that process.  The poems that make up this new manuscript are as a house of cards, and a slip will bring them back to meaninglessness. I’ll have to carefully set them down to the proper publisher, get them into the right hands. Once there, I can start building on my next obsession. So I can continue this crazy work we call WRITING.

Thank you for your time.

1. I want to note that I use Scrivener, a licensed software made for writers. I would credit that this software has done wonders for helping me structure and order the MS, and I’d recommend it wholly to other writers.