Journey to a Debut Poetry Collection: 7 Resources for Poets

The journey to finishing my debut poetry book started with embarrassing myself. I was on Cape Cod to attend Marge Piercy’s poetry intensive. Before arriving, I had sent her some of my poems and a bio where I declared I was “at work on my first collection.”

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This declaration mattered to me, because I was trying to reclaim my writing life after years of disruption: a divorce, working too much just to cover the bills, family issues that fried my creative instincts. That line in my bio was a promise to myself that I wasn’t just dabbling. I was here for the writing in a real way, and I was creating a genuine body of work, a soon-to-be book.

During my one-on-one meeting with Marge, she zeroed in on that line. “Your first collection—how many poems from it are already published?”

We were in the gazebo by her house, surrounded by her roses. It was a warm day, and getting warmer for me. I felt my face turn the flush-pink of finding out how naïve I am. At that point, maybe two poems had been published.

It wasn’t a collection yet, she explained. Not until I had published a good 40 percent or more of the poems would I be on my way to a genuine body of work, a soon-to-be book.

This was news to me, and you’d better believe my bio was revised that same day. Instead of a public declaration, I made a new, private promise: I would just work on the poems, meeting each one as it came. I would find good homes for them in literary magazines, poem by poem. I would loosen my grip on the body of work and try to learn from its parts.

I loosened my grip so much that a funny thing happened: I didn’t realize when a collection had actually, finally started coming together. It only hit me as I worked on a submission to Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize, which is given to a connected sequence of poems.

Maybe I’ll just print out everything I have and see where that gets me, I thought. I gathered my individual poems, nearly all of them written in the years after that poetry intensive with Marge. I was stunned when almost 80 pages of poetry came out of the printer. There it was: the first rough cut of my first collection. Declared years earlier, but created in secret, even to myself.

As soon as I saw the stack, I knew the relationship to the work was going to change. Now, instead of obsessing poem by poem, there would be new questions: Which poems speak to each other? What sounds and images are weaving through the poems, pointing to larger themes? What mood or feeling is created when certain poems are read first and certain poems are read last?

Whenever there’s a shift in the relationship to the writing, there’s a need for new resources. This couldn’t be truer for the shift into working on a poetry book. Envisioning, revising, and submitting a poetry manuscript is one of the tougher publishing journeys, I think. The revision process alone can feel murky and highly subjective. Ask 100 poets what makes a “good” book or “successful” book or a “strong” book, and you’ll get 100 different (and interesting!) answers.

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But it’s the submissions process for a poetry manuscript that can be especially tough if you don’t have resources and support. I write and submit across genres, and poetry is consistently the one that tests my patience.

At least in terms of traditional publishers, there are limited paths to getting a poetry book published. Poets typically don’t have agents rallying around their work, and most poetry publishers accept submissions only once or twice each year. It can make the process unusually long yet urgent at the same time. There’s pressure not to miss tight submissions windows, and then there’s the reality that a rejection now means waiting a whole year to try again.

This became clear as I submitted the manuscript that would become my first book, Divination with a Human Heart Attached. I began building a thorough spreadsheet of any and all poetry book publishers as a way of coping with the uncertain process. (Data can be comforting, right?) By 2018, the spreadsheet included over 100 reading periods and seemed like something that might be useful to other poets. I made it publicly available, and it grew into a project now known as the Poetry Bulletin.

Resources like these and the others I share below help make the process easier for all of us, but more importantly, I hope they reach poets who don’t have extra time and money to drop into the submissions process. My hunch is that many of us come to writing poetry in the wake of life’s disruptions. It helps to know there are companions waiting when we finally get there.

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