ruinporn: on books and birth
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| vision / inspo board |
I feel sometimes like putting together a full-length book happens for me in one of three ways. The first was probably the most maddening, which was writing a whole bunch of poems that may or may not be tangentially related, then trying to make them make sense together, an approach often done by writers when they put their first collections together (or at least how I did.) The second, which I guess could be called project approach is to know what you are writing about before you start--either in detail or vaguely with the whole book written with those goals in mind My third and fourth books were like this--one being my thesis manuscript for my MFA (girl show), the other a narrative experiment (the shared property of water and stars.)
It's the third one I use most often and its less really about intention, but more about constellations of poems and series and ideas that begin to come together. Right now, there are actually three of these, or maybe more like two and half because one is a little slippery and may amount to nothing. I tend to write and publish things in smaller increments as chaps and zines or other bookish things, but often they exist in a vacuum at the time I'm working on them. Only later do they start to pair up and speak to each other. Or maybe they always were and I just get better at listening. It usually takes one series that makes it all make sense and I feel like I may have crossed that line with some new poems this week that make some of the other more recent projects hang together and solidify it under a single title. That title above was rattling around in my brain since the fall when I was working on other things but suddenly things started to make sense with the latest series (which still doesn't have a title, but the individual poems mostly do.) They may form a nice book with some other recent series of poems (particularly memoir in bone & ink and maybe unreal city (which I initially had earmarked for elsewhere, so we'll see.).
Sometimes projects overlap and move back and forth between potential books. My Walter Potter poems were like this. I wrote them with the intention to put them amongst automagic's Victorian feel, but thematically they wound up better suited for animal, vegetable. monster. I have several series that seem as yet to have no identifiable home, that is, until something new somehow draws them into orbit.
ruinporn is actually very much about decay, about aftermath, and maybe it's actually a fitting follow-up to collapsologies, which besides the Persephone book, is the last full-length I completed. It was just one of several possible titles for the next book project I was kicking around, but this weekend, it just seemed inordinately right for the work I've been penning lately, especially since some of those take their inspo from other kinds of decor writing I've been doing the past year. I have not yet put them all in single manuscript yet, which is probably what I will do when I finish these new pieces in a couple months. Somehow the books don't feel as real until you have a stack of white pages in front of you.
(If you are interested in seeing a peek of the newest unreleased poems that form the spine of this book, you can check out my Patreon or my Tiny Letter, The Paper Boat, where I've been sharing some on occasion...)
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