Annie Finch | April 2022

Annie Finch

There is a secret to writing poetry, and it’s one that has been largely forgotten. I teach poetry writing to people of all levels of expertise and many backgrounds, and most of them arrive at my classes in a state of significant frustration. They love poetry, and they have high expectations for their own poems. Yet, even if they hold an advanced degree in creative writing, they have likely never been taught the tools necessary to create the moving, inspiring, heightened shapes of many of the great poems they know and love—or even how to shape a poem until it feels “finished” to them.

The good news is that this forgotten knowledge hews to an intuitive, accessible principle. Poets in my classes find that the principle, which I call “structural repetition,” yields useful guidelines for heightening the language of poems:

1. Notice anything that repeats in your poem: a rhythm, a word-sound, syntax . . .
2. Reorganize your poem, creating a pattern out of the repeating things.
3. Revise, add, and subtract to heighten your favorite repeating elements.
4. Consider allowing some repetitions to become predictable.

Much else that can be learned about structuring poems—line, meter, scansion, stanza, form—develops from here. Basic enough—but life-changing, for those of us who have not been conscious of the single defining characteristic of the art we love. Since the early twentieth century, the academy’s focus on the page has led to a general overlooking of the uniquely palpable experience of poetic structure in the body. With that physical awareness at heart, I start with the premise that structural language patterning (pattern created through the structural repetition of any language element or elements) is the single defining characteristic of poetry.

This doesn’t mean that only poetry uses patterned, repeating language. Prose can also use gorgeous, lyrical, repetitive, incantatory language patterning. But while prose can be decorated by pattern, only poems are structured by pattern. A structuring pattern is predictable, reliable; if it were a wall, it would be a load-bearing wall. If a structural pattern stops, the reader will perceive that something is broken and will know how it should be fixed, just the way someone who sees a hole in fabric or a crack in a clay pot will know it is broken and how it should be fixed.

Here is a passage of prose and a passage of poetry by the same author, James Joyce. In each example, I have changed one of the repeating words. In the poetry, the consequences are structural, while in the prose, they are not.

…and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume sweet and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Frail the white rose,
and frail are Her hands that gave,
Whose soul is sere, and paler
Than time’s wan wave.
Rose-fair and fair, yet frailest—
A wonder wild,
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blue-veined sweet.

In the original version of the first passage, the repeating word (“yes”) appears ten times—and yet readers who don’t know the passage won’t perceive that I changed one “yes” to the word “sweet”; if anyone does notice, they will respond to the change as a matter of taste and aesthetics, not structural necessity. By contrast, in the original version of the second passage, the second repeating sound (“ild”) only appears twice—and yet attentive readers who don’t know the passage will notice that I changed one of these appearances to the word “sweet.” They will know something is broken, and they will know how to fix it—by replacing the word “sweet” with a word that rhymes with “wild.”

This difference has nothing to do with aesthetic quality. It is objective, like saying that soup is mostly water and bread mostly flour, that paintings are two-dimensional and sculptures three-dimensional. Some poetry is flat, dull, full of ordinary language, has no decorative repetition, and sounds ugly. But it is still poetry. Some prose is musical, inspiring, loaded with decorative repetition, and sounds gorgeous. But it is still prose. Poetry is made using structural repetition, and prose is not. That’s the difference. Sure, there exist exceptions, hybrids, and gray areas—like bread soup, combine paintings, and prose poems—but they don’t invalidate the usefulness of a common-sense distinction: structural repetition is the single basic difference between poetry and prose.

Structural repetition can operate at any level of poetry in English: at the level of syllable (structures of syllable count); the level of accent (structures of accent count); the level of word-music (such as alliteration, consonance, and rhyme); the level of word (where words repeat exactly, such as identical rhyme or the repetends in a sestina); the level of concept (structures such as S+7); the level of visual effect (repeating effects with visual impact such as concrete poetry or erasure poetry); the level of metrical foot (anapestic, iambic, trochaic, dactylic, amphibrachic, etc.); the level of phrase (including anaphora and refrain); the level of syntax (such as parallelism or repeating parts of speech); the level of line (the structural repetition of the line break itself, which marks free verse as poetry); the level of metrical line (sapphic, hendecasyllabic, etc.); the level of stanza (structures of rhyme, repetition, rhetoric, and so on); the level of length (the length before the ending which seems to mark a prose poem as a poem); the level of form (ghazal, haiku, pantoum, sonnet, villanelle, etc.)—and the level of the book.

When structural repetition is applied at the level of the book, an overarching repeating structure generates a series of sections that can organize a multifarious collection of disparate poems into a movingly cohesive manuscript. This higher-level organizing element—I call it an organizing structural principle—not only brings the sections into relation with each other, but also brings each poem into relation with its own subsection and in turn into relation with the organizing structural principle.

Samuel Coleridge wrote that all parts of a work of art should connect with all other parts, a state he called “organic unity.” If we consider the book of poetry as a work of art, at least three levels of organization are needed to attain the harmonious dance of interrelated parts that Coleridge describes: a whole (the entire manuscript, in the case of a poetry manuscript); individual units of the whole (poems, in the case of a poetry manuscript); and intermediate parts of the whole (sections, in the case of a collection of thematically disparate poems—although in a concept-centered book, such as George Herbert’s The Temple, Anne Sexton’s Transformations, Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Cathy Bosman’s Letters from Sylvia, or Van Jordan’s M•A•C•N•O•L•I•A that limit themselves thematically to a single image, context, or narrative, the theme itself can play this role).

These three levels can be arranged in a one-dimensional way, called parataxis in syntax: the mid-level clauses are strung together with coordinating conjunctions (“this happened and this happened and this happened and this happened”). A paratactical organization of a book of poetry groups poems into sections based on theme or topic and give those sections numbers or names, arranging one thing next to another thing next to another thing, all at the same level, so that the three levels of the book move more or less in parallel with each other.

By contrast, using an Organizing Structural Principle, or OSP, creates a more complex type of structure for the manuscript. The grammatical corollary to this type of organization is called hypotaxis. In hypotaxis, instead of coordinating conjunctions stringing items along at the same level, subordinating conjunctions link the different clauses into relationships that gain meaning from the level of the whole, creating an interdependent web of all three levels together (“this happened to the words in spite of the fact that this happened to the clauses; therefore, this happened to the sentence”). When you assemble a book of poetry in this way, your aesthetic attention to the links between and among different segments of the book—the synergy and symmetry among parts—can create a poetic impact analogous to, but perhaps even more far-reaching than, the effect of an individual poem.

The witch, writer, and permaculturalist Starhawk speaks about a group of basic natural patterns that are found in paleolithic and neolithic goddess art—and in contemporary permaculture gardens. One of these perennial natural patterns, the branching tree, offers a useful way to think about hypotactic structure in a book of poems. If the whole book is like the trunk, and the individual poems are like leaves, then the sections that keep everything unified and vibrant are like the branches of the tree. And just as the branches of a tree need to arise organically from the trunk in order to do their job of communicating life and energy back and forth between leaves and trunk, so the parts of an organizing structural principle need to arise organically from an overarching shape, form, or concept that informs the book, if they are going to work effectively to make your manuscript as tensile and unique as a living thing.

The poetic effect of a book that’s organized according to a structural principle doesn’t only come from the power of the poems themselves; it arises from the manifestation of the poetic sensibility that has arranged disparate poems together with attention to structural repetition. A book interwoven through an OSP is more likely to be felt as a conversation: questions asked by the book as a whole are answered by individual poems; adjacent and analogous sections comment on each other; remarks made by poems or sections are responded to by the book as a whole. The sublime, universal creative process underlying this organizational matrix—a web of connections inviting patterns of love and meaning, both within the book and between book and reader—is the discovery and nurturing of pattern.

The organizing structural principle that will hold together your manuscript can use any form as a model —anything that combines parts into a whole. In my experience, the more disparate the different poems in your manuscript, the stronger and more cohesive the OSP will need to be. Poets who consult with me have discovered all kinds of principles waiting in their poems, ready to help organize the book: a series of compositional modes from music, different members of a family unit, characters in a Shakespeare play, levels of Buddhist meditation. The only requirement for an OSP is that it be as strong and flexible as needed to do its job, both whole and parts holding the inherent structural integrity to interconnect the different poems in your book in a meaningful way.

Principles of structural repetition can operate in how we choose which poems to include in a book, which sections to divide the book into, what to name the sections, how to order the poems within sections, and so on. From William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to W.B. Yeats’s The Tower to Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen, poetry collections have been shaped according to the same principles of structure and symmetry that shape poems. My own awareness of this overarching aspect of poetic structure began with my own books. Each of my collections of poems went through an astonishingly long gestation before its final structure emerged. And in each case, only the discovery of the right organizing structural principle broke the impasse.

In 1993, as an assistant professor living in the fields of Northern Iowa with my husband Glen and four-year-old child Julian, I was working on my second book of poetry. I recall it had had several paratactical structures by then, with a new title for each. My first book, The Encyclopedia of Scotland, had been a book-length poem with its own internal structure, so this second book was actually my first poetry collection. And first collections of poetry are notoriously challenging to organize, often including a miscellany of poems written over a long period. The earliest poems in mine, including “Still Life,” “Sapphics for Patience,” “In Cities, Be Alert,” “Coy Mistress,” and “Another Reluctance,” had been written fifteen years earlier as assignments for undergraduate classes; the latest, a nine-poem sequence about different goddesses created for a theater collaboration, was brand-new and had just premiered at the Hearst Center for Performing Arts under the title “The Furious Sun in Her Mane.” The book felt like a hodgepodge. It had been years, and I felt as stumped as ever. How could I possibly unite all this in a meaningful way?

One night, after Julian was asleep, I sat on the living room floor (since childhood, I have always worked on the floor when organizing anything) and again divided the individual lyric poems into piles based on theme—nature, motherhood, sex, power, spirituality—as I had done many times. I was shuffling through the piles again, as if that would help, when my husband Glen came in from washing the dishes and sat down on the couch.

“How’s it going?” “Not great. I’m really stuck. Hey, can I ask your advice?” “Sure.” “I want to include the ‘Furious Sun in Her Mane’ sequence. But it’s so different from everything else in the book. I don’t know whether to put it at the end of the book or the beginning—they both feel kind of weird. Which do you think would be better?” “Well, you could break it up—and put one of those poems into each section . . .” “Cool. Thanks. I’ll try it!”

I had never imagined separating the nine poems in “The Furious Sun in Her Mane,” since I had written them as a group. But the idea was perfect. Each of the nine goddesses I had chosen for my show had her own mood and her own powers, from youthful Rhiannon to transformative Inanna—and their characteristics meshed uncannily with the concerns of my earlier poems! To house each goddess in one of the piles on the floor was a gratifyingly smooth process; only a few sections needed to be combined or rethought. It was uncanny to discover that my earlier poetry dealt with the exact same themes that had shaped my recent poetry/dance collaboration. Not only did it give me a new awareness of myself as an artist with sustaining concerns; it also surprised me spiritually. Before I knew these goddesses existed, I had been interacting with them simply by engaging with my life as a woman through my poems.

Using the goddess sequence as an OSP transformed the paratactic arrangement of the book, which I had been messing around with unsuccessfully for years, into a hypotactic arrangement. The new structure situated each poem more exactly in relation to every other poem, both in its own section and beyond, highlighting and deepening the book’s themes. And while it more clearly defined and separated the different sections, it also united them, because the goddess poems connected with each other in multiple ways. Each of the nine poems is named after a goddess and focuses on evoking and describing her; each one uses a meter and form that would have been used in the culture where its goddess arose; and the order of the poems, as I had developed it for the dance collaboration, connects all nine into a narrative of spiritual development. While not every OSP needs to have such strong similarities and links between its sub-parts, I find that these connections enhance the value of the structure, both for me as a poet and for the reader absorbing the book.

Incorporating an organizing structural principle into a manuscript can be a beginning as much as an end. Working with an OSP offers me the same feeling—the deep company of limits—that I tend to prefer when composing poems. I am a forceful reviser, and poems without a sturdy skeletal structure for me to work against have sometimes nearly disappeared during revision. Conversely, when I have found or developed a structure that suits me, my poems and books tend to become more themselves, more visible. In this case, after settling on the OSP, I needed to reconsider which poems were included in each section and their order, which deepened and enhanced my understanding of each poem and led in turn to many revisions. I took a new title from one of the goddess poems and was well on my way into the final stages of the book now called Eve.

Paul Valery wrote, “A poet’s function is not to experience the poetic state; that is a private affair. His [sic] function is to create it in others.” I love to write in meter and form not only because they often hypnotize me into a “poetic state,” but also because I believe their patterns (especially when read aloud) meet readers halfway, pointing the way for readers to recreate the “poetic state” within themselves. And organizing structural principles strike me as useful in precisely the same way. They structure the poetic experience like design in a tapestry, offering readers a chance to experience physically and tangibly the whole, the parts, and the understanding that links the whole and the parts—almost like giving them the experience of recreating the book within themselves.

Eve was born in 1997, and my strategy of shaping my poetry collections as if they were poems was launched. Now I revise and work and consider an OSP in basically the same way that I revise and work and consider the structure of a poem. Finishing my next collection, Calendars, five years later, I was encouraged by advice from the poet Carolyn Kizer to foreground a group of seven seasonal chants that I had written for an earth-spirituality witches’ circle. Again, I organized a collection into sections; each section of the book centers on a different part of the year, and metaphorically the seasons also become the seasons of our lives.

My newest poetry collection, Coven, completed just last month, is also organized around a sequence of poems, a series of chants to the five directions that create the pattern of a ritual circle. It is the most tightly patterned of all my books, since the poems of each section are connected to each other not only by theme but also by the poems’ meter, the titles’ meter, and even by punctuation. Thus, the title refers not to any one element but to the shape and movement of the entire book.

Organizing structural principles have been helpful not only for my own books of poems, but also those of many poets who have worked on books with me individually or in classes. Wilderness Sarchild’s first collection of poems demonstrates well the usefulness of an organizing structural principle. At the age of seventy-five, Wilderness brought me a captivating manuscript of assorted poems on the theme of being an older woman. The patterns in the book were based on theme and voice, with some poems that told anecdotes, others that ranted, others that yearned. A paratactic approach would have been simply to arrange these charming, readable poems into thematically related groups and call the book done.

But Wilderness’s manuscript was so wide and encompassing that I felt it was demanding a more developed structure. I tend to believe there are no coincidences in poetry, so I took this feeling as valid information and stayed alert for a clue, an anomaly that would stand out and lead us in a new direction as we worked to bring the book into its own. And sure enough, among the poems was one that didn’t fit properly into any of the sections suggested by the other poems. It was called “Old Women Talking,” and it distinguished itself from the other poems not only for its humor and charm, but for its length, ambition, and breadth of vision. “Old Women Talking” was an ars poetica, a manifesto that perfectly summed up all the themes of the book as a whole.

So, we decided to name the book Old Women Talking. We put that poem at the beginning of the whole book like a foreword—a sort of map of the whole. Then we arranged the other poems into thematic sections and gave each section a name based on the kinds of talking listed in “Old Women Talking,” such as “Gossiping,” “Keening,” “Remembering,” and “Scolding.” In the resulting branching structure, each poem gains additional impact and context based on which section it is in and on the relation of that section to the other sections in the book—as well as the relation of those sections to the title poem itself.

To summarize the process, I used with Wilderness —which is the process I now use with most of the books of poetry I work on (not all, because there are always exceptions!)—it has three parts:

1. Notice patterns (in Wilderness’ case, noticing the various voices threading through the poems).
2. Use the patterns you’ve noticed to help you discover and choose a structure (in Wilderness’ case, choosing the title poem and naming the manuscript the same).
3. Develop your chosen structure further to make its pattern(s) more evident to yourself and the reader (in Wilderness’ case, adding the section titles).

This process may seem simple in retrospect, yet it is surprising how few contemporary poetry books that would clearly be strengthened by a hypotactic arrangement have made the leap. Aside from the fact that many people simply haven’t been taught to think about poetry collections in terms of OSPs, why don’t more poets do this?

One reason may be that most of us were taught to write free verse, linking lines along a single plane with the line breaks functioning like “ands” in a paratactic sentence (line and line and line and line and line). When free verse uses repeating device such as parallelism or anaphora, it is usually in a decorative way rather than a structural way: the repetitions are unpredictable, and a reader couldn’t tell if the patterns were broken. So, we are not in the habit of using structural repetition at the level of the poem.

Another reason poets may not use OSPs is because we may fear that the use of such a complex structure on the poet’s part would be an imposition. Trained by modernism and postmodernism to honor a reader’s freedom to create their own interpretative patterns and meanings out of the juxtapositions of words, let alone the juxtaposition of poems, we may find it unseemly and intrusive, even clumsy and annoying, to arrange poems into an obviously intentional structure. This is of course an aesthetic choice that deserves complete respect—obviously OSPs will not be for everyone!

I will add, though, that having read more than my share of postmodern theory, I find the fears that may accompany such a choice unnecessary. Our interpretative freedom is our interpretative freedom, and no mere poetic structure can undermine it. If anything, I have found that the more a poet can do to develop all the interpretative angles of a poem or a book of poems, the more we can do to make structurally evident our own underlying categories and assumptions, the more honest we are being about the baggage we carry into the work—and, therefore, the more space we are leaving the reader to create their own interpretations, truly and authentically. This is not to say that clumsy, obvious, heavy-handed OSPs are not possible—of course they are, just as there are heavy-handed formal poems and heavy-handed free-verse poems—but it is not the OSP structure itself that creates the limitation in such cases.

A final reason poets may not use OSPs is because we may sense that the leap to hypotaxis could open up whole new cans of worms, prompting extensive revisions of poems that had seemed to be finished. This line of thinking is—fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be—100 percent true. Coven, for example, was almost completed when I finally accepted that the book I had thought was going to be a thematically organized collection of mostly metrical poems instead needed to be shaped like a spiral moving through five sections strictly adhering to five different metrical patterns. Whoops! Once I realized the shape the book would have, I spent another eight years recasting the poems’ meters, replacing them with other poems in the appropriate meters, and reorganizing and rearranging the sections. It was an overwhelming amount of work, but the process of seeing the poems come into their own through their new metrical context was so exciting that I never regretted my commitment.

Of course, most organizing structural principles don’t involve extensive metrical recasting. And if you are truly excited about yours, you likely won’t mind the extra time. If there was really a process that would show you deep new ways to revise your poems and bring them to new levels of excellence, wouldn’t you take it? After all, if you can’t strive for perfection in poetry, where can you? I like to consider every setback or delay in publication, in the long run, as a gift, an irreplaceable opportunity to improve the book still further. Coven is only now becoming finished, after having been in process at least fifteen years. Why rush? As Yeats said, when we revise a poem, it is ourselves that we remake. I always advise poets to wait as long as they like before publishing a book. Once it’s in print, it will be too late to improve it. And while I’ve heard many poets complain that they published a book too early or before it was really done, I have never once heard a poet complain that they waited too long to publish.

If you are interested in experimenting with an OSP for a poetry manuscript and aren’t sure where to start, the three-step process used for Wilderness’ book should be helpful, especially if you keep the following guidelines in mind:

For the first step, “notice patterns,” you will only be gathering information. Your sole duties are accurate observation, full record-keeping, and an open mind. Have paper ready (I recommend three-dimensional paper for this, not a screen), and maybe a few different kinds and/or colors of writing implements. Read through your manuscript as if you’ve never seen it before, writing down anything that attracts your attention and repeats more than twice. Look for patterns of imagery (up/down, water, clothing, animals, locations, colors), types of language (words from different languages, turns of speech, levels of diction, noteworthy punctuation), unusual words that recur, poetic devices or forms, repeating themes or categories (historical periods, types of people, workplaces, imagery associated with areas of expertise or interest). If there are more than three examples, it’s a good idea to jot them down as headings with lists of page numbers or line numbers underneath them. At this stage, resist the temptation to start dreaming about your OSP, because that might lead to ignoring something valuable. Just notice what patterns are there.

The second step, “use the patterns you’ve noticed to help you discover and choose a structure,” is your time to dream. Take a new piece of paper and look over the patterns you’ve noticed, seeing what calls to you as a possible OSP. Maybe it will be the sounds of a group of words that you are suddenly excited to imagine as section headings. Maybe it will be a special group of images that you feel called to honor, to elevate, by allowing poems to crystallize around them. When you finally hit on a pattern that feels authentic, you will recognize it through a sense of excitement and, above all, curiosity. Do you wonder how the table of contents will turn out if you organize the book that way? Are you eager to reshuffle the manuscript and discover how those poems would look grouped together? Do you feel jazzed about how this new structure might impact the revising of your poems? An organizing principle that is forced can feel as if it is shutting things down or oversimplifying, but one that is authentic will feel as if it is opening doors into greater mystery and depth.

When contemplating a possible OSP, consider its symbolic resonance, your familiarity with it and feelings about it, and how it connects with the themes and topics of your book. Study it until you understand it deeply. Look up its etymology or those of its associated words. You may also want to weigh its mathematical or geometric resonance. What is its overall shape? Is it circular, like a clock, or meandering, like a river? Does it contain smaller shapes, like a snowflake? Does it have a few large parts, like a decade, or many smaller parts, like a year? What are the meaningfulness and effects of the limitations it imposes? Are the distinctions between its different parts a bit fuzzy around the edges, like the Seven Deadly Sins, or quite distinct, like the Three Fates? All of these qualities may end up affecting not only your book as a whole but the individual poems.

For step three, “develop your chosen structure further to make its pattern(s) more evident to yourself and the reader,” it’s time to dive in and see how your prospective OSP works in action. Here’s the basic principle of structural repetition, something to keep in mind as you rearrange the manuscript: Put things that are alike into analogous places to create repeating, predictable structures. Check out all the tools you have available in your manuscript—table of contents, dedication, section titles, poem titles, epigraphs, footnotes, appendices, and so on—and remember that just because a poem has been published in a journal in a previous form or under a previous title, that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.

Finally, give yourself free rein to play, and do your best to turn off your inner critic. Especially if you’ve spent time in an MFA or other academic creative writing program, the critical inner voice can be disarmingly strong where anything involving poetic repetition is concerned. This is why poets who work with me to learn meter and form often report inner voices insulting them with words like “silly,” “stupid,” “babyish,” and “embarrassing”; after one such online workshop, I tweeted from @poetrywitch: “Revelation arrived at by my class of (women) poets after a workshop in #deepform: In patriarchal culture, the need for order is feminized and reviled as weakness, a threat to individual ego . . .” If you find similar internal voices attacking your rearrangement of the manuscript, talking to them can be helpful. My inner critics respond well when I thank them first. A little speech (saying it aloud won’t hurt) like this usually works pretty well: “Hi, inner critic. Thanks for your input. I know you’re trying to protect me, and I appreciate it. I hear you, and I’m ok; I’ve got this. It’s time to stop now. You’re dismissed. Don’t say anything else.” If all else fails and your efforts at creating predictable symmetries in your manuscript still meet resistance, try repeating this motto, the teaching I most hope to convey to the poets I work with: “It’s okay for my poetry to feel good in my body.”

Now that I acknowledge how an OSP can change not only one of my books but also the individual poems in it radically for the better, I aim always to keep a manuscript of poems in progress. Even if the poems are so few and raw that the book may not be done for a decade, I start assembling it anyway, for three reasons: 1. Revising a poem in the context of my other poems, similar to the way it will ultimately appear in a book, gives a complex creative jolt to the revision process; 2. it may take quite a while to hit on the book’s best organizing principle, so the sooner I start exploring potential structures, the better; 3. revising poems as part of a manuscript works nicely; I know where they are, and revising one poem leads smoothly into revising another. Two other poets I know seem to agree: Maxine Kumin once told me she kept her poems-in-progress in a single document on her computer desktop and scrolled down through the document to revise them, and Tim Seibles showed me a loose-leaf notebook full of printed poems-in-progress that he carries with him.

My book revision process tends to happen in waves; I will work through a printed copy of the manuscript with pencil or pen in hand (lately I prefer high-quality artist’s pencils; they are cheaper, neater, work well upside down, and they are far better for the environment). I make tons of changes on some poems—deleting big chunks, reordering stanzas, changing the meter, and so on—and none on others. Once the process is done, I’ll enter all the changes into the manuscript and print it out once again, typically removing the previous version from my favorite clip binder to make room for it (the previous version gets paper-clipped together and dated to be saved; my archive in the Beinecke Library includes dozens of manuscript versions for each book of poetry with many different contents and titles).

Of course, certain poems need a lot more attention than others. When it becomes clear that a poem is ready for an intense overhaul, I will copy the current version from the book into a poems-in-progress file in my favorite writing program (Scrivener), where I can make multiple revisions and easily save the major drafts in an organized fashion and print them out. I print drafts, edit them, and reprint them for as long as it takes—days, weeks, months. When the poem seems finished for the moment, I’ll copy this “final” version back into the manuscript. This can be an exciting moment and sometimes leads me to print out the manuscript again, just to see how the new version of that poem looks in the freshly edited context of the book.

Since I discovered the use of structural organizational principles, my relationship with my poetry manuscripts has become deeper and more complex, and it’s no exaggeration to say that some of the most ecstatic moments of my life have happened during these moments of creative connection with my books of poetry. It’s pure gold revision time, and so hard-earned (through all the previous work on the poems) that I would never waste a second. I’ve learned the hard way to warn anyone who’s in the house with me: “I’m going to read through the manuscript now. Please don’t say anything to me until I tell you I’m done.” And still, I seek out a safe place, just in case, because I know how intensely damaging an interruption can be. It’s not just that I’d have to go back and start over from the title page, even if I’m already halfway through the book; it’s that it might take hours if not days to regain my inner equilibrium and creative trust.

So, I find privacy, and I sit down with the manuscript. Just holding it starts me down the path into strong trance. It’s a fragile yet powerful condition, like holding a sacred flame. It’s similar to the feeling I have reading a favorite poem by a poet I love, but exponentially more potent. The mood starts to constellate as I hold the manuscript and strengthens as I read the outer title page with intention. Like a thread growing stronger and thicker, it builds through the inner title page, the dedication, and the table of contents (of which I read every word, in order). By the time I begin the first section, I have become one with this connecting thread. My heartbeat and breath have slowed, my senses are hyper-attentive; in body and heart and spirit and mind, I have become nothing but one ear—an inner ear that can hear only one internal sound: the sound of this exact book.

The same process of revision that happens within each poem is also happening at the level of the sections and of the book as a whole. The main reason I can’t be interrupted is that I’m holding the whole book in my awareness at once and I’m stretched to the max, just at the edge of losing a part of it. In addition to revising individual poems and rearranging them within or between sections of the book, or developing new sections and patterns, I might combine two or three poems into one. Or an element from one poem, such as a pronoun or punctuation mark, might find its way into other poems in the same section, opening them up into new dimensions as the section further develops its own identity and vocabulary. All the while, as in a living tree, the different parts of the book’s identity seem to hold space for each other, keep aware of each other.

Being in the presence of other poems within an overarching structure seems to give poems permission to evolve, to discover new aspects of themselves—whether in form, voice, tone, or meaning. And the same can be true for the OSP itself. As your manuscript changes, it might become clear to you that the current organizing structural principle is simply not working, for one reason or another, and needs to be discarded like ballast. For many of my own various poetry manuscripts, the structuring principle has changed several times, and along with it the central principle of each section, the poems in each section, and the title of the book. This has not been a problem for me; when it happens, I’m always so excited about the new idea that I’m happy to move on.

To develop an OSP for your poetry manuscript may not always be easy. To keep the big picture and the details in mind simultaneously, while doing both justice, requires will power, clear awareness, creative stamina, emotional vulnerability, and willingness to give up a measure of ego-control in the service of something larger. But if you are the sort of poet this approach will benefit, you may already be recognizing that the effort can be well worth it.

As you discover which aspects inspire you the most, you may find that clear organizing structural principles at the level of the book, just like meter and other organizing structures at the level of the poem, can offer a poet immense wellsprings of creative inspiration. And of course, even if you end up not wanting to structure your book with an organizing principle, the very process of looking for one is sure to help you understand your manuscript far better.

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Annie Finch is the author of six books of poetry, including Spells: New and Selected Poems, Calendars, and Eve (both finalists for the National Poetry Series), and the verse play about abortion Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (Sarasvati Award, 2012). Her books about poetry include the poetry textbook A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry; many anthologies on poetic form; and The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self. She is the Founder of PoetryWitchCommunity.org. This essay will appear in Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, forthcoming from the University of Akron Press.