How To Order a Collection of Poems

A scene from my bed, where I ordered my fifth collection of poems ...

Let me start by saying there is no “right” way to order a collection of poems. Some of the best poetry collections (and best poems, too!) are the ones that break the rules.

In my experience, how poems are organized in a collection is more instinctual than anything else. Listen to the poems, let them be in conversation with each other—feel your way through the ordering of your collection.

But I know, too, that guidance can be helpful. After all, how can you be inventive and break rules if you don't know what the “rules” are in the first place? Also, most of us want to publish our poetry books, so it can be helpful to have a sense of what publishers of poetry collections are looking for.

I’ve just completed a draft of my fifth book of poems (gulp!). I’ve read and studied hundreds of poetry collections, plus helped edit quite a few poetry manuscripts.

Here are some methods that I find helpful when ordering a collection of poems.

Start to Identify Your Themes

Usually, you know it’s time to start thinking about putting a poetry collection together when you’ve got a pile of poems that you feel proud of and that are in good shape. Poetry collection publishers typically are looking for manuscripts that are at least 48 pages, so most poets start thinking about ordering a poetry collection when they have at least 48 solid pages of poems. (Always carefully check a publisher's guidelines before sending out your book; some require at least 50-60 pages.)

But if you are thinking in terms of books, it’s not just a matter of 48 pages of strong poems (though this is important too). You want the poems to form a speaking whole when they are grouped together.

I don’t love the word “theme.” It’s very middle school English class, isn’t it? But it’s the right word to describe what you're looking for here. You want to start to identify the main topics, questions, and ideas your poetry collection is wrestling with.

In other words, what were your obsessions as you wrote these poems? What do the poems seem to come back to over and over again?

You’ll probably gain a deeper understanding of what this is as time goes on and you continue revising the collection, but it can be helpful at the beginning of the process to read all the poems together and jot down some themes/obsessions you see throughout.

Print Out Your Poems

Once you’ve identified a book-length number of poems that seem to be glued together by some sort of theme, my recommendation is that you print them all out. There’s something powerful about holding your poems in your hands, and you’re more likely to move them around and find connection between them when they’ve been taken off the static screen of your computer.

See How the Poems Speak to Each Other

This is the part of the process where you want to allow yourself to get messy. If you have an open space where you can lay out all your poems and look at them together, that can be helpful. But you can also just sit down somewhere with your stack of poems and leaf through them.

The idea here is to look at all the poems together and see how they speak to each other. Does one poem ask a question that another poem attempts to answer? Do you have poems that seem to want to nestle together, because they have a similar mood or subject matter? Do you have poems that are part of a sequence, or could be?

Seeing the connections between the poems is going to help you see how they might want to be ordered. Sometimes it makes sense to even write down the poems’ similar images, themes, and questions.

I’ve done that for most of my manuscripts. For example, I have a document I made early in the process as I was working on my fifth book of poems where I made a list of themes. It looked like this:

• Travel

• Home

• Father

• Here on Earth

• Body

Then I found poems that fit those themes and labeled them as such. Some poems had more than one of these themes. Your categories might be wildly different from mine. Yours might have more to do with narrative story/chronology, imagery, language, or something else.

Come Up With a Loose Structure

Next, you want to start to come up with some sort of structure for the collection. There are a few main ways to do this.

Divide Into Sections

If you’ve identified a few themes within the larger theme of the manuscript, you can break your book into sections, each based on the theme. So, using the example I have above, I might start by dividing my poems into five sections (Travel, Home, Father, Here on Earth, Body). If the idea of “theme” doesn’t work here for you, you can think more along the lines of sections based on images, chronology, questions, language, etc.

Many books are structured this way, though you don’t always know what the poet’s themes were, and the themes may have been much less concrete than mine were. Often, the themes the poet had in mind when they structured their book acted more as scaffolding to help shape the collection and aren’t totally visible to the reader.

Try a More Braided Style

Another way to order a collection of poems is to try a more braided approach. This is where you order the collection more intuitively, seeing how each poem connects with the poem before it, and threading the poems together that way. You might move in and out of several themes a few different times throughout the manuscript. Braided collections can also have section breaks.

Thread the Poems Together

In my opinion, however you do it—whether you are relying more on themed sections or braiding—you’ll want to make sure that one poem flows into the next poem in some sort of purposeful way.

I like to think of each poem having a connection/anchor in some way to the poem that came before it. It could be an image, color, piece of language, idea, question, or just general vibe. Whatever it is, the poems shouldn’t just be randomly placed together—they should flow into one another in some way, even if it isn't something you can fully articulate.

Find Touchstones at the Beginning and End

Poetry collection publishers usually prefer that the manuscript has some type of arc. Your book doesn’t need to solve a problem or fully answer a question. The wonderful thing about poetry is that it exists in a place where pat endings aren’t necessary. In poetry, blurred lines are often where the beauty lies.

Still, readers usually want to feel as though they’ve come somewhere new by the end of the book, that the collection has changed them (and you, the author) in some way.

I find it helpful to think in terms of touchstones. Is there a poem you’ve placed toward the end that speaks to one of the poems at the beginning? Do the last few poems hint at some type of new perspective, growth, healing, deeper understanding?

The ending doesn’t have to feel happy or positive. But it should feel like the poet and reader have traveled somewhere—spiritually, emotionally, narratively—by the end of the collection.

Start Strong, End Strong

When you send your book out to contests or open reading periods, your manuscript is going to be read along with hundreds of other manuscripts. The truth is, many manuscript readers will read the first few poems in your manuscript and might not continue if they aren't hooked from the start.

So, you want to start with a banger. Is there a poem in your manuscript that readers seem to love? Is there a poem that has heat, is captivating, leaves you wanting more? The first poem in your manuscript should hook the reader and also introduce the book as a whole in some way.

When it comes to poems to end the book, you also want to pick a strong poem. As mentioned above, it can be helpful if the poem speaks in some way to the beginning poems in your book, or to the central questions/themes/obsessions of the book. Most of all, you want a poem that will be memorable to end the collection—one your reader will carry once they're done.

Brainstorm Some Poetry Book Titles

You’ll want to make sure you’ve got a captivating title for the collection. My advice is to go through the collection once you’ve gotten it into a general shape that you like, and then spending a session reading through the manuscript and going fishing for titles.

Titles can come from:

• Interesting lines/phrases from the poems

• Titles of the poems

• Quotes/language from other works of literature that inspired the collection (attributed, of course)

A good title contains interesting language, and tells you a little something about the collection, but doesn’t give too much away.

Set the Collection Aside for a While

After you’ve come up with a draft of the collection you like, my advice is to set it aside for a few days, a week, or more. This will give the collection time to percolate, and for you to come to the collection with fresh eyes.

We often can’t really “see” what we’re doing and what a collection might need while we’re steeped in it. So stepping away is definitely part of the process.

You may have to step away and come back multiple times. All of my collections go through many drafts, and that’s totally normal!

It’s during this time of stepping away and coming back that you might:

• Figure out which poems just don’t belong in the collection, and remove them (they aren’t gone forever; you can save them for your next collection)

• See where there are gaps, and where new poems might need to be written for the collection (I often write my best poems this way, once I have put together a draft of a collection)

• Reorder the poems, or refine the sections/themes

Have a Few People Read Your Collection

Besides setting aside the manuscript and then coming back to it, I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a few other eyes on the collection. My first reader is my husband, but I also show the poems to a couple of close writer friends. I have hired outside poetry editors, and I’ve found manuscript editing classes to be super helpful, too.

All writers—no matter where they are in their career—need another set of eyes on their poetry collections. Doing this can feel vulnerable and scary at first, but it’s going to make your collection better, I promise.

You’ll want to find a reader or editor who you feel comfortable with, and who seems to “get” what you’re doing. If you aren't feeling comfortable with a particular reader or editor, that's okay—they just aren't the right match for you.

Remember, too, that when you get suggestions, that’s all they are—suggestions. You can take them, or choose to let them go. You are the final editor of your manuscript.

Work With a Poetry Book Editor

Looking for guidance on how to order a poetry collection, or how to publish a poetry collection? Reach out to me! I offer compassionate, detailed, thoughtful poetry editing for chapbooks, manuscripts, and individual poems.