What are some of the challenges for someone putting together a first book?

For every book, resolving that structural issue is the crucial thing. And every time is like a first time, because the material at hand is different — what you figured out before is not going to be much help. The particular challenges each time probably emerge to a large extent from the period over which one wrote the poems at hand. Often, with a first book, a poet is fresh from completing an apprenticeship, and probably has tried all sorts of modes and voices, in the search for her own; the major challenge to the collection then centers on how to choose from and then integrate very diverse kinds of work. Other times, though, a first book will have an amazingly high degree of formal or even tonal coherence already in the pieces — I’m thinking of, say, James Tate’s The Lost Pilot. For that kind of collection, the challenge is often finding sufficient range and variation.

Whatever the case, I think the hardest thing, especially the first time one does it, is setting aside any notions of one’s “best poems” or “weaker poems” which can lead to all sorts of false and dangerous and self-deluding arrangements, just as it would when making an individual poem. The task is first to be ruthless in deciding what to stand by and letting go of the rest; and second, to then treat all the pieces as equals and find the arrangement that best honors the individual poem and simultaneously lets it contribute most effectively to the whole, the tonal or formal arc of the book.

Many editors seem to prefer publishing poetry collections that have a central focus or tell a story. There seem to be less books that are simply a collection of a poet’s best recent work. Should a poetry collection always have unity to the point that a kind of story is told? Where does unity leave off and a book-length sequence like Kyrie begin?

Kyrie
BY Ellen Bryant Voigt
(W.W. Norton, 1996)

To my mind, a book is another form, like a poem but longer, even more complex, more inclusive. I’m not sure what you mean by “unity,” but if you mean some sort of coherence, something that decides matters of inclusion and exclusion, something that makes the whole larger than the sum of its parts — then yes, I think that should always be present in a book, just as it must be in a single poem. But it certainly doesn’t have to be either thematic or narrative. Kyrie is a sequence based on both thematic or at least dramatic coherence (imagined survivors of the 1918 influenza epidemic) and narrative structure (there’s a time-line running through it, and recurring characters as in a novel). But I’d say its primary source of coherence is purely formal: each separate piece is more or less a traditional sonnet. Certainly the formal variations interested me far more than the epidemic ever did, and the narrative structure was a late addition, a way to manage focus and pacing within that single-minded dramatic circumstance.

Set aside whatever editors may or may not prefer, since that’s the business of publishing, not writing; and expand a bit that notion of “unity,” to include more than focused subject matter or “a kind of story.’’ Without some sort of formal/structural element in the project, how would one know what is or is not one’s “best recent work”? Or, whether there was enough of it to make a book? Or, what order — what structure — would be best for the individual pieces?