Tips For Compiling A Poetry Pamphlet by Tim Dwyer

I recently received an email from a respected poet. The subject was ‘Write a Chapbook in a Weekend’. Don’t do it! Although a pamphlet is much smaller than a full collection, it deserves time and consideration. Think of it as your calling card after you have spent time and effort publishing your poems in respected journals.

I don’t think someone is ready for a pamphlet after they have just drafted their 25^th poem. I had gotten back to writing for about five years before putting together a chapbook manuscript in 2015. I focused on submitting to journals, print and online, ones in which I would not be embarrassed to have my poems. Having a portfolio of published poems gives confidence to your writing and starts to get your name known among those most likely to purchase your future pamphlet or to publish it.

So let’s say you have 10 or more poems that have been accepted or published (20 even better), including some in the more competitive journals or a competition or two. Now you have a standard to compare your other poems that you are revising.  You should wind up with more than 25 polished poems, as your goal is a collectiveness, not 20-25 single poems.

Collectiveness is the hard part. But with a pamphlet size one can more readily find a cohesion and flow without redundancy— it is more difficult to craft that in a full collection. Beware of the ’filler’ poems.

There are a number of ways to approach cohesion.  One is to at the outset focus on a topic— this has become fairly common. Broad issues such as ecology, human rights are common, or a focus on a specific issue or incident, for example, the Mother and Baby Home of Tuam. If one chooses a topic approach, the challenge will be to still craft poems rather than journal articles and avoid redundancy or too detailed ‘facts’.

Another approach to the pamphlet draft is memoir or life story. Perhaps you are someone who has lived through a unique experience that will engage readers and encourage their own reflection. Much excellent poetry of course is engendered by one’s personal experiences. The challenge here is that rather than self as a vehicle, the collection becomes self as endpoint, and the manuscript leans more toward a diary than a collection. The writer might struggle with editing out some very personal ‘little darlings’ and a reluctance to shape/change actual events for the good of the poem.

I personally lean more toward finding themes that arise from my own poems. Look at the poems you have published or revised well. Pay close attention to the ones you are especially drawn to and look at the themes that keep coming up. Perhaps loss or transitions or hopes or finding meaning in the 21^st century or… and perhaps identify two to three themes that can be in  dialogue through the collection and may inspire the drafting of further poems responding to these themes.

After deciding on your collection approach, look through your poems that fit well with this.  You might see two poems that have been published that are so similar that it might be redundant to include both. There may be another poem that is among your favourites, but it seems to be an outlier. So unless you work on some revisions, you might leave out a couple of good poems.

When you have 20 or so poems, hopefully you have a good reader to look them over with any feedback. Even previously published poems might improve with changes of line breaks, punctuation, a word added, changed or taken away.

As you read through the poems, be open to gaps between poems, that might inspire a new drafted poem. You might have a piece in your file that you weren’t sure stood on its own, and it turns out to be very good as a bridge or pivot for other poems.

Think of your collection as having a beginning, middle and end. Lay out your poems on a large surface, a floor or your bed. Look for beginnings and endings, then the middle. This could be as straightforward a beginning as a poem about your early childhood, and an ending at your present life, but chances are there will be intuition at play. Look for what poems build on one another and unfold. A poem alluding to someone’s insomnia and nightmares will likely come sooner than one that clearly describes trauma.

Certainly working with chronology or seasonal changes might be a good or initial way to order the collection, but not at the expense of an emotional building or resonance. Following a poem of the speaker’s  parenthood could be a similar themed one of childhood. However if one has two winter setting poems, then a summer one followed by another winter poem, that summer one might be too disjunctive for a reader.

Along with cohesion and a building development in the order, it is important to include variety of feelings, tones, themes and structures.  Mix up longer and shorter poems, narrative and lyrical, first, second, third person, tragic with hopeful ones. Better not to have the 3 love poems in a row. We poets often slant toward the dark/dysphoric, the complex emotions- is there a place in your collection for humour and the good life?

Though your collection is not a novel, can you find a sequence that builds toward something akin to a climax or a pivot? And perhaps a bit of a denouement when themes or issues are tied together- but not too neatly or unrealistically. And don’t belabour the ending. You don’t want  the last 5 poems slouching toward an ending/resolution; perhaps the last two or three. And again, don’t shoot for all resolved, happily ever after. An ending that has a sense of life continuing after the last poem can be very effective.

So you pretty much have your order, beginning, middle and end, and you believe you have revised all the poems to their optimum. Now read each poem as part of that collection. Are there some changes in words, phrases or images that help this poem speak to others within the collection? You have one poem with a robin, and a later one with a wren- maybe have it be that same robin showing up again. Earlier in the collection you are on a seaside bench with a friend. Near the end of the collection, you rework a poem to include ‘what I never told you that day on the seaside bench’. Alluding to other poems or adding details to an important event/issue in later poems can help promote the pamphlet’s collectiveness and dimension. In a way your collection is trying to build a world.

Ideally, you have put together the pamphlet well ahead of the deadline, to give time to get to know it as a collection, for finishing touches, last punctuation changes and a little shifting of order— but take care not to become overly second guessing. And be sure to keep to the number that is optimal for the collection— if 25 is the max, you will be tempted to go to the limit, but is your 22 poem collection stronger?  And beware of the’ last minute poem’ written right before submission! If specific poems require a note, make it as succinct as possible, and only if necessary, such as a literary quote, an obscure person referred to, etc. It might be best to have a Notes section at the end of the collection, along with Acknowledgements.  Don’t add a dedication page to your initial submission unless requested.

Follow the guidelines of the publisher exactly. If something is unclear, ask. Check whether or not the publisher wants an acknowledgements page for any poems previously published, and if they wish to have a certain percentage of poems to be previously unpublished.

Before sending, check again for any typos, weird spacings, consistency of formatting. If you have titles in bold and at the left margin, make sure this is consistent. Make sure the pagination of the table of contents corresponds with the pagination of the poems in the manuscript. Have at least one other person proofread for you. It is so easy to keep overlooking a typo.

And if your pamphlet is accepted, be open that the editor might suggest various changes, including deleting/revising some poems. Pick and choose what you consider important not to change and briefly explain your rationale. But be willing to defer. Adopt an attitude of what is in the best interest of the pamphlet rather than the best interest of your ego. Have some good poems in reserve in case the publisher requests. Good Luck!

Tim Dwyer’s debut full collection, Accepting The Call (templarpoetry.com) has won the Straid Collection Award. His previous chapbook is Smithy Of Our Longings: Poems From The Irish Diaspora (Lapwing). His poetry appears regularly in Irish, UK and international journals. He was raised in Brooklyn by parents from Galway, worked as a psychologist in New York State prisons, and now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland.