The Twenty-Fifth Poem: Some Thoughts on Ordering Manuscripts

Robert Frost said that in a book of twenty-four poems, the twenty-fifth is the book, but every manuscript is different. What I learned from ordering one book didn’t teach me about the next. When I was first compiling poems for the sake of a thesis, my advisor told me to put all my poems on the floor and group them by emotional impulse. That process gave me three groups, but the stacks had more than one subject, even though I felt they came from the same emotional space. I once heard a poet speak about trying to move on from his first book, and he was having a hard time letting go. He was told to write a poem that absolutely didn’t belong in the book. I liked this idea of writing a poem to break up with a manuscript, but instead of breaking up with the whole book, I broke up with the manuscript a section at a time. Those break-up poems ended up being the last poem in each of the three sections of the book. Even after breaking up, I did write a few more poems that ended up being included, but I’d moved on. I’d fallen in love again.

I knew I was writing a second book when I wrote a poem that I knew didn’t fit the first book. Someone once told me this would happen, and it was one of my least favorite pieces of advice, mostly because it required patience. The poem I wrote was written in the voice of a “we” and to me, sounded so sharply and distinctly different than the “I” of my first book. From that first poem I wrote, I knew a few things about this chorus of women. They’d been through war. They were in exile, perhaps mid-apocalypse. They were disappointed by God. By narrating this way, I could write poems that were informed by history, but not beholden to it. I could write about many things that I felt I didn’t have access to as a 21^st century American writer.

I’d always been fascinated by pilgrimages, and shortly after I started writing these poems I began living in my car, so the sense of wandering and seeking infiltrated the poems. The narrative chorus at least knew what they were looking for, but there was no final, holy location for me, no arrival. However, as I traveled, I learned my location. I knew where I was meant to go. Shortly after moving there, I stopped being able to write these poems. A few still came, but they were mostly about grief. I realized the book had broken up with me this time, and there were no easy piles of emotional impulse. I knew the arc—that elusive twenty-fifth poem—was hiding in there somewhere, but I didn’t know what the key was. For me, it turned out to be Leviticus. Chapter twenty-five, versus eight through ten lay out the crop rotation (seven crops for seven years), and then mandates a fiftieth year, the year of jubilee, when the fields should rest and the people return home. Not only did the notion of home appeal to me, but my grandmother, who has spent much of her time predicting the end of the world, claims it will happen in a jubilee year. Since I had about fifty poems, I made seven sections of seven poems, and the final poem, “Jubilee,” closes the book.

Breaking up is never easy. I still miss those poems. I can still read them, but I miss creating them, that wonderful rush of discovery. I’ve fallen in love again, of course. I don’t know where the new poem is going, but I’m sure I will figure out the mystery of the twenty-fifth poem eventually. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy all the smaller mysteries.

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