This blog is an interview with poet and teacher Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet.
Zack Rogow: What’s the biggest difference between writing poems one at a time and putting together a book-length poetry manuscript?
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet: Writing a poem requires close-up responsiveness at the level of the word, the image, the line break. A manuscript asks you to open your aperture, to apply that same amalgam of thought and feeling to a more complex construction.
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| Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet |
What book helped you most?
Probably Louise Glück, Firstborn. Her sensitivity to image and sound and especially rhythm (which doesn't get talked about enough as a throughline) helped me understand how poems that weren’t necessarily part of an overt narrative could speak to, and build on, each other. I realized that I had to trust that my own poems were also talking to each other, even if I couldn’t hear them yet.
So should a poetry manuscript have a single theme or narrative thread?
I'm not going to tell you that. I mean, should it? No. Can it? Of course. And yeah, “project books” are having a moment—or maybe we’re already in the backlash. A book can be drawn together by voice, energy, image, recurring obsession… the perceptions of a human consciousness moving through the world.
Take Berryman’s Dreamsongs. They don't exactly have a narrative thread, but…
They have a vibe.
Berryman is obviously problematic in a lot of ways, but still, a great example. 77 Dream Songs showed me what a book could be, what a voice could be. Its central consciousness is tied up with voice as masquerade, aspects of the self enacted as characters. For me, tracing that kind of shapeshifting is a big part of ordering a manuscript, along with movement of sound and rhythm.
What about chronology? Should poems set in childhood come first?
A novel can have flashbacks and flash-forwards and other temporal devices; why not a book of poems? And of course, not every manuscript is autobiographical, even given a consistent speaker.
How many poems do you start with when you put together a manuscript, and how many do you end up with?
My first book went through so many poems, and structures, and forms in the seven years I sent it out. The wait was frustrating—but I learned so much in that time. The first draft had maybe 30 poems. Then it got longer, and shorter again, and longer, in a kind of accordion movement. That’s happened with almost every manuscript I've worked on, my own and others’.
When I start to feel the poems as an interconnecting web, writing back into their ideas and images.
What if you feel a gap in your manuscript, but you wrote the poems on either side of the gap a long time ago?
Don’t try to go back to who you were then. Think instead in terms of call-and-response across time. I sometimes ask students to write out an old poem, then write into the space between the lines. They end up with either a new take on the original poem or raw material for a new one.
With my current manuscript, I started by writing about autoimmune disorder, this literally self-attacking system, in part as a metaphor for women’s internalized perfectionism. I followed the questions those first poems raised, and the world flooded in—all our disorientation and suffering and grasping for control. What’s the connection between the ideal of the optimized self and rising fascism? What is it to be a person, or a nation, or a community? I say this as a continually recovering perfectionist, an intersectional feminist, a neurodivergent human with chronic illness who thinks most easily in metaphor. You trace the constellations, feeling a spark that can leap the gap.
How long should it take for a poem that connects previous poems to appear?
We live in a culture that prioritizes success and achievement and finishing things. But poems don't work that way. You have to be patient, wait for the poem you weren’t ready to write before this moment. Often I’ll finish one poem, then maybe five years later, be surprised by another that approaches the same territory much more deeply.
The flip side is that sometimes a poem just doesn’t work in a particular manuscript. Many poems I love, poems published in my favorite journals, have never ended up in a book.
Sometimes they're the beginning of a new book.
Yes—and when you’re working on a first book, it's very hard to think beyond that. Eventually, each book might include a few poems that are still working out questions from your last one, and a few that prefigure the poems to come. I often go through a long period of writing stuff that doesn’t end up in the book I’m working on, because my emerging obsessions are still, well, emerging.
Do you have a particular editor or publisher or reader in mind when you're compiling a manuscript?
When I’m writing the poems, I just need to write them. I guess there's some consciousness that my consciousness is whispering to, but it feels strange to ask that question until much later on. Once I begin putting a manuscript together, then I can start to see it from outside, and to think about where it might be in good company.
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (lisagluskinstonestreet.com) is the author of The Greenhouse (Frost Place Prize) and Tulips, Water, Ash (Morse Poetry Prize). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Plume, Zyzzyva, Kenyon Review, Nasty Women Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She reads, writes, edits, teaches, and works one-on-one with writers from her backyard Poetry Shack. She has terrible handwriting but is surprisingly good at math.
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Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
