My dear poets,
You still have time to send us your wonderfully crafted chapbook manuscripts for Minerva Rising’s “Dare to Be” chapbook contest judged by the poet Heather McHugh.
I’ve written three poetry chapbooks and have learned some lessons along the way. Here are five quick tips I’d like to share with you, just some lessons I’ve learned along the way. Take another look at your manuscript and send it our way. Dare to put your work out there.
1. Adhere to one theme, voice or constant thread. A chapbook is not your 20 best poems that you’ve written over the last three years. Well, the manuscript should contain your best poems, but you need to take the reader on a journey. Is each poem about a piece of fruit? Do you narrate your journey as a lover or a mother? Do you write about building a cathedral? Does every poem contain the word blue? You must know what your chapbook is about; it’s often a book that someone will read in one sitting. When you look at it with a critical eye, does it have a theme, a narrative arc that makes sense? Show your chapbook to someone else who has never read it, and ask them what it’s about, if it feels complete, if they’re satisfied.
2. Put each poem through an obstacle course. Most chapbook publishers ask for a range of poems, like 14 to 28. One of my chapbooks was 13 pages. I believed in every poem. You need to believe in every poem so that we will when we read your manuscript. Take out the filler poems. Don’t hide weak poems in your book. Because chapbooks are so slim, we’ll notice that you slipped in five weaker poems. Some poems aren’t meant to see the light of day. You know which ones. Each poem in a chapbook needs to sing on its own. Workshop each one, line by line. Make the poems earn their place in your book.
3. Know what your glue is. I wrote my chapbook Little Deaths over a short few months. I thought the story was about my son who was born premature. The chapbook was rejected. Then , when a fellow poet read the manuscript, she said, “Yeah, it’s about your son, but it’s really about your relationship with your dead grandmother.” With that, I suddenly got it. I took out weaker poems about my son and took out all the poems about God, because the book wasn’t about that. Those poems may find a place somewhere else, or maybe not. So I wrote new poems to what the heart of the book was, the glue that holds it together: the ways that my life echoes that of my grandmother’s, including difficult pregnancies. And, the book was snapped up. So I restate what I just said in tip 1: You must know what your chapbook is about. Write what it is in three sentences. Look at each poem and the flow of the book. Do they add up to what the book is about?
4. Order is important. There are 5,001 and more ways to order a chapbook or a full-length. There are lots of essays and books written on ways to order: in time order, in theme order, in emotional order, whatever it is. You can spread your poems on the floor and order and reorder all night till the sun comes up. One poet I’ve worked with told me that her mentor expected her to justify why each poem followed the next and if she couldn’t, off she went back home to consider the manuscript for another two weeks. The point is that the order must make sense to you as the writer. Why does one poem begin the book and another close it? If you don’t know, the reader won’t either. She’ll be lost. I’ve read chaps that try to do too much, and they lose me. Keep your theme and poems tight. Each poem should lay down another sure track toward the conclusion. Don’t slack off at this point. This is a marathon. You’re almost at the end. Don’t stop before you get there. One final note: Your title. Make it work for you too. Is it the title of one of the poems in the book? Is it a fragment from another? Write 10 titles and take the strongest one. Wow us with the title. That’s the first encounter we have with it. Make us fall in love from the start.
5. Form and final proofing matter. Read what the publisher is asking for: two title pages, no identifying information in the manuscript, an acknowledgements page at the end. A certain font, no double spacing, whatever it is. If you expect a publisher to give your work the consideration time it deserves, consider what the publisher wants to see from serious writers. Also, proofread. Well. I hired a proofreader to read my final manuscripts. Not because I can’t use spell check, but because I had been immersed with the work for so long, and I needed a fresh pair of eyes, someone who knows grammar, the nuances of commas and so forth. Someone who will take her merciless red pen to my work and shine it up. It’s worth it. You don’t want an editor to be turned off by grammatical and punctuation errors. We’re writers, people.
Now, send us your chapbooks. We can’t wait to read them.
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Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry chapbooks Absence of Stars (forthcoming July 2015, dancing girl press & studio), Little Deaths (forthcoming November 2015, ELJ Publications) and Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications). She’s the recipient of CALYX Journal’s 2014 Lois Cranston Memorial Prize, the 2012 Princemere Journal Poetry Prize, and Ruminate Magazine’s 2012 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize for her Pushcart Prize-nominated poem “Necessary Work,” chosen by Li-Young Lee. Her poetry, nonfiction and projects have been published or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, Heron Tree, MiPOesias, Radar Poetry, Ruminate Magazine, PANK, Salt Hill Journal and THRUSH Poetry Journal, among others. She received her MFA from The Pennsylvania State University, and currently serves as media director for Minerva Rising Literary Journal and editor of Stitches Magazine, which recently won a Jesse H. Neal Award from American Business Media. Visit her online at www.nicolerollender.com.
