A Poetry Book Is a Poem
Listening to visual artists describe their work helped me shape my book.
Image credit: Michele M. F.
In Anthony Cody’s Borderland Apocrypha, the titles of poems are as long as the lines of his poems. That’s because the titles are lines. They run across the top of the horizontally-oriented pages, with black lines pointing down towards poems that grow from different parts of the title. And then, those short poems become the titles of other poems. It’s a startling work of hybrid poetry, which tugs at the first line “Standing in line to take a passport photo, an old white man looks at me and claims I am running“ and unravels that interaction into all that it implicates about borders, racism, nationhood, otherness, and state violence. The rest of the book contains more hybrid work: erasures of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, photographs, charts and figures, and other experimentation.
Nikki Giovanni’s book My House contains two sections, “The Rooms Inside” and “The Rooms Outside.” I always loved this distinction, as though the book itself is a catalog of rooms, and as if Giovanni herself is the house. Another spatially-organized book, Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, has sections that take place in different rooms in an asylum for disabled people.
My own book, The Animal at Your Side, is organized by landscape. I wanted the book to start with wandering (trails, shores), then go inside houses (interiors), then travel very far, to other countries, and finally to go back inside, so deep into the darkness that you can only see what is very close to you.
I wanted to do this in part to resist narrative closure. If I had arranged the poems differently, by subject for example, it might have given the impression of having a conclusion. A “and then everything was fine.” But the topics of the book—home, estrangement, travel—not only didn’t have conclusions for me, but felt inconcludable.
But I was also making a work of art that was spatial and visual in nature. And art doesn’t always have neat answers.
The year that I first put together The Animal at Your Side, I went to a residency at Vermont Studio Center where visual artists gave weekly talks about their work. One of the artists had been doing a series of paintings from the inside of cars. Some of them looked out of car windows at night, in the rain. Others looked out at traffic around construction sites, orange traffic cones stretching into the distance. She said that she had started the paintings as a way to calm herself down when she was teaching her teenage daughter how to drive. “I’m not trying to say anything in particular about car culture, or oil, or urban planning. Just how something that we think of as awful in traffic can also be kind of beautiful.”
I was amazed by how visual artists talked about their work. I thought they would have a thesis, a movement they were responding to, some big academic art words that I couldn’t understand—because that was how I had been taught to look at art, as something that required work and study.
But when they were creating, the artist’s motivations were often personal, based in memory, relationships, and what felt right to them based on their own aesthetics. I recognized in these talks something of myself. Many of my poems grew from a deep, interior place that seemed to know more than I could say in my conscious mind. Yes, meaning mattered to me, but so did sound, image, and the shape of the poem on the page.
It's the same with a poetry book. Many great books are organized by subject matter, but to create a book structure, you can also go into the same instinctual, dream-like part of you that knows more than you conscious mind—exactly as you would write a poem.
At Vermont Studio Center, after those artist talks, I created the table of contents for what would become The Animal at Your Side. Through seven years of drafts and rewrites, the structure never changed. The freedom I felt after those artist talks helped me create a book structure that moved like a poem moved, outward and then back in.
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