making manuscripts:
an irregularly braided conversation

by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet & Annie Kim

In January 2021, Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (The Greenhouse; Tulips, Water, Ash) and Annie Kim (Eros, Unbroken; Into the Cyclorama) spent several hours over Zoom, talking about constructing the poetry manuscript. First books, recent books, crying, self-consciousness, the merits and drawbacks of the cold open. A gunshot, a hammer, and a zebra. Why writing poems is, like, really hard. This is an edited version of their conversation.

First book, second book, and where poems come from

AK: When I started writing what became my first book, Into the Cyclorama, the poems were rooted in history—my own, my family’s. And that first draft manuscript was . . . okay. It needed a bigger voice, though; it needed more colors. So I decided to write new poems for it. I added and took away. Looking back on my process now, it seems pretty typical for a first book.

The second book came completely out of one emotional zone, though it ended up having two distinct imaginative realms. There’s a weird historical fiction realm—poems in the voices of the composer Scarlatti and castrato singer Farinelli—and then there’s an autobiographical realm. That made ordering the book really tough. But it was the challenge. I needed to do it; that’s what the book was about. A lot of people who read the drafts asked, “Are you sure this should all be in one book? It sounds like two books.” And, yeah, it was like two books, like two trunks of a tree. But I was determined to make it ONE book, damn it!  

For a poet putting together a first book, though, I think it’s going to feel different. Our advice for that might be different, too, since the first book is more likely to be a miscellany—a cookbook, you know, with recipes for brownies and pot roast and spaghetti.

LGS: When I was first trying to put a pile of my poems together in a manuscript—I’m not much of a crier, but I tried and tried, and I cried every time. Really. It became very clear that I had no idea what I was doing. How did these poems talk to each other? Did they even belong together? Did I even have anything to say? I had been thinking in terms of individual poems for so long, and there was no obvious form or narrative to tie them together. Or that’s what I thought. Now I believe that, as I insist to students when I teach, you may feel like there’s nothing connecting your poems, but each of them comes from the same consciousness. You have obsessions, and ways of thinking and perceiving the world, of making patterns; that is inescapable. And so those poems do talk to each other, more than you realize—they can’t not. Your job is to find out how.

The last semester of my MFA, I studied with Marianne Boruch, who is brilliant. I wanted to understand ordering poems, so she had me map out the flow of a bunch of first books. It was like following a trail through the forest with a magnifying glass, just mapping step by step. And I was suddenly able to order my work. In retrospect, that jibes with how I’ve ended up making anything I write. I try to get out of my own way and trust my internal compass. Eventually, it’s time to figure out what’s going on, what this new thing wants to be. I sort of reverse-engineer that understanding—being open to what’s working, finding the energy. Can the poem strike that spark elsewhere? And if I’m editing someone else’s manuscript, or teaching, then I also need to translate that intuitive process into a discussion of craft, without being overly prescriptive or killing the mystery. 

AK: I do that reverse-engineering, too. You said two things I want to touch on. The first is the idea that everything that comes out of us as poems is related. I firmly believe that. And I think that more than anything else we’ll probably talk about, that intuition, that trust, is crucial. Because if it comes out of you from a genuine place versus, say, “I have to fulfill a promise that someone’s given me,” everything is going to be related.

How they relate is a big piece. But for me, it’s also about the arc of the manuscript and the eventual “so what?,” the “what happened next?” 


LGS: Yes. And that can happen outside what we usually think of as narrative; it’s more like mapping movement of thinking and feeling, how a consciousness evolves over the course of the book.


AK: Right. I don't know if “clarity” is the right word for me here, but it’s making that pencil line darker and darker. Making more and more of a contour so that consciousness becomes more developed on the page, more real.


LGS: Self-aware but not self-conscious. We’ve talked about therapy before—how you get that deepening understanding over time. There can be similar movement through a book of poems, even if the aim of the book is different.

Having struggled so much with what eventually became Tulips, Water, Ash, I was nervous about putting together the manuscript of The Greenhouse. But it was such a different experience. All that practice and analysis Marianne had me do had soaked in and fermented. I’d finally ordered the earlier book in a way that worked; maybe I could do it again. And The Greenhouse had a strong chronological element—all the poems at least touch on the intense early years of parenting, which gave me a default to push against. I listened to my intuition, and there was something there to hear. And when I backed up and tried to figure out why I had made certain choices, they still made sense. 

So I’ve just finished the manuscript of Annihilation, and I’m at a stage of casting about, seeing if anything happens. For me, that can mean very little happening for a long time. I mean, I’m still putting notes in my journal and dumping them into a folder and not looking at them. Eventually, I have to trust that something new will happen, and I will write actual poems again, and they will be somehow different from my old work, and I can follow their threads to make more poems. This gets less stressful each time, since it somehow happened before, right?

OPENING POEM: Shaggy or tidy

 

AK: One of the things I really struggled with in Eros, Unbroken was what to do about the opening poem. Initially I’d just jumped into a 12-page narrative sequence that goes back and forth in time, back and forth between pronouns (“Violins: Violence”). I wanted to create the feeling of a cold open. But one of my friends who read the manuscript was like, “you know, it’s a little hard for me to jump into this book with that first poem.” I resisted that advice for a long time. Later on, I realized she was right and I put a shorter poem at the start of the book, which is a lot more common.

But I do feel like there’s a tendency in some manuscripts nowadays to be too tidy. To say, “here’s the opening—a short and sweet, lyrical, taut poem that’s going to teach you how to read the entire book.” I will be honest and say that I don’t love that as an approach. How do you feel about that?
 

LGS: My first book had that kind of signposting in the opening poem. I resisted it, but that’s where it wanted to go. I mean, there are always trends and styles. For me, a lot of it is realizing when I’m feeling a need to conform, or be contrary, for no reason having to do with the actual poems. But what matters is does it serve the book? It forces you to be conscious of what you believe a book should be. It seems like both of us have to fight ourselves to figure that out for every new project.

AK:  I should also confess that I had an orderly poem at the beginning of my first book, too!

LGS: So before we talked, you read my new manuscript. I’d just moved a long, rangy, kind of ambitious poem into that opening position, which made the flow of the manuscript less of an arc and more of, I don’t know, getting dropped in the middle of a 3D spiral. And you helped me see that that wasn’t quite working; it was more a reaction to not wanting to start with an obvious signpost kind of poem, which had been first before. But neither was the right move. Now I’m sitting with the opening poem you suggested, which enters the manuscript at a kind of tangent, and liking it. But I’m still waiting to figure out if that’s because I want you to have solved my problem, or because it’s a favorite I haven’t been able to place in a journal, or because you’re a genius and it just works. Probably the latter.

a quilt or jazz or five panes of glass

AK: You’ve said that putting a manuscript together is a process of letting the poems teach you what the book is about. What does that mean for someone putting together a first book? It’s lovely advice and I completely agree. But it’s pretty abstract.
 

LGS: As a classical musician, you’ve said you think about the movement of a symphony. I sometimes ask students to look at a manuscript in progress and think in terms of other forms as metaphor. Are you a painter? A woodworker? What if this were a building, or a dance, or a piece of music? What shape would it have in that form? Is it a marathon or a sprint? Is it a tree or a carrot? Imagine what kind of being this book might be. That sounds quite woo-woo, yet it can be really helpful. One of my students imagined her manuscript as a dominoes game. One as a quilt. There are so many ways to think about how the poems move.

AK:  Right, it frees us from strict logical expectations we might have for a book of poetry. This has to have cause and effect, or there has to be a logical tie. 

LGS:  I’m biased, but sometimes I think it’s harder to be a poet than to do other art forms. I use language to write marketing slogans for my clients, you use it for legal arguments, we all use it to love and to fight and ask directions. Our medium is this thing that we use for so many other functions that are not poetry, and sometimes it’s hard to leave those things behind. Whereas when I make things that are nonverbal, I lose myself in some other realm. Poetry is what I’m drawn to most and love most, but there’s this huge chain we’re dragging behind us of all the other functions of language, and the expectations that go with them. 

I was talking with a friend, trying to explain the kind of movement I wanted this manuscript to have. I ended up drawing this scribbly thing that feels a little like one of those early 60s jazz graphics, with pieces sparking off a central throughline. There’s motion, but it's not primarily linear. Something about sketching it out helped me crystallize the manuscript’s felt shape in my mind.

AK:  That’s really cool. I was envisioning something while listening to you. So imagine a single gunshot fired through five panes of glass. And the glass is all stacked up. If you pull them apart, though, the shattered panes, you’re going to see a different trajectory, a different starburst, a new kind of splatter pattern in each one. But you know that they’re connected because the underlying material is the same, and it was the same source of energy that went through them. I’m not sure how it connects to what you just said, except—

LGS:  That’s what’s happening in your book. There’s this animating question and this animating trauma, and where they pair together, they splinter off into all these different realms, like ripples in multiple universes.

AK:  Yes! I really like your visual thinking. And what I’m always on the lookout for is whether there are too many dots and dashes, sources of energy, or ways things show up as patterns. Is it one gunshot, or is it a gunshot and a hammer and a zebra? How much richness can we take, how much needs to be obvious or made more conscious so it emerges as a pattern?

LGS:  That makes me think of the aspect of editing that’s about stripping away. I can get very ambitious about how many strands a poem has. I’m thinking about one long poem in sections, which at one point had five major imagistic or thematic strands, and I just could not handle that level of complexity. And I had to cut almost half the poem to make it work. If you’re lucky, sometimes those cuts become another, related poem. Sometimes you just hang onto them, in case.

following the underground river

AK: We both do a lot of alternation between tonal shifts and between types of poems—long, short; tight, loose. You’ve got all these great poems in Annihilation—short-lined, enjambed, often couplets, very Dickinson-like—that sit alongside longer, looser sequences. We’ve both got the alternation thing going for contrast. And I do in Eros, Unbroken what you’ve called “irregular braiding”—bringing up one thing, then another, but not too predictably.

LGS: I love that.

AK: Me, too. And then we both like to create types of poems that repeat throughout a book. For instance, in your new manuscript, you have pieces you call “interstitials,” which I love. Can you talk a little about that? How did that come up for you? 

LGS:  When I got to the point where I had enough poems to try ordering this manuscript, I did a retreat at a friend’s lovely tiny house, which—well, a tiny house is not the best place to order a manuscript, it turns out, but I just spread everything out on the loft bed and crawled around trying not to bump my head. All these poems, plus a printout of my notes file.

I keep a million paper notebooks, on my desk, in my bag, next to the bed. I also write on old envelopes, the flyleaves of books I’m reading, the back of my hand. Eventually, it all gets transcribed into this enormous messy Word doc I’ve been working in for over a decade through multiple books and so on. It’s one way I trick myself into starting poems. I’d printed it out and highlighted all these bits that felt like they were part of the manuscript, but I had no idea how. I started putting them as placeholders and then realized that they could act as interstitials, traces of the manuscript’s underground river. They were rawer, more direct transcription than crafted poems. 

AK:  I like the idea of the underground river. I’m also thinking of the grout between tiles. And I think you’re right—some of the interstitials are deliberately unfinished, the opposite of some of your taut, short poems that are polished to a shine. 

LGS:  The lack of polish kind of freaked me out. But the psychological and philosophical question at the heart of the book is about that impulse to polish. The cult of perfectionism, absolutism, even fascism. The cold clean sheet of ice. So I found them both threatening and compelling.

AK:  That’s a great way of saying it. I have something similar in my current manuscript—these little, uncapitalized, unpunctuated “not-self” poems. And in Eros, I made a decision after I saw that I had two or three poems either talking to or talking about Eros. I thought, are there other poems that have a similar call to be an Eros poem? It would be good to give them all linked titles to signal to the reader that they’re related. 

Up, down, sideways—moving “narratively”

AK:  One of the saving graces of this otherwise messy thing I had in Eros was that some pieces had to go first, narratively speaking. I had to introduce me as a character and my predicament—a 40-year-old freaking out about the past. And I had to introduce the character of the father, introduce the tropes and the themes of music, the violin, the body. Given all the emotions that rollercoaster throughout the book, one thing I worried about was placing “Violins: Violence”—the most emotionally intense poem—so early on. Because where do you go from there? 

LGS:  You don’t want your manuscript to be the Celine Dion of poetry.


AK:  Haha, right! But there can also be verticality and horizontality in a book. The first part of my book was moving really vertically, going deep into these obsessions and painful memories. But after that, I realized I could spread out horizontally—open up, be less claustrophobic. So now I’m talking about the castrato, who’s an imperfect analogue for me, and also a character in his own right. Then here’s music, more broadly, here’s the me-character more broadly. Later on in the book, for instance, there’s a poem, “The Hydrangeas,” that’s about flowers at one level, but also about the artist’s uneasy relationship to family. I wanted to pull back the lens here and look from a greater distance—still with emotion, but not quite so raw, angry, indignant. 

The narrative action of a book of poems also still feels important to me. I don’t know your take on this—you might be less narratively involved.


LGS:  I think I’m becoming more “narratively involved” over time, which I somehow connect with being self-revealing. Is that more solipsistic, or braver? My work is increasingly personal, but also interested in using the gestures of story to call a single narrative into question, to move between the layers. Evolution doesn’t just go upwards. There are branches and the braiding we talked about. It’s the tangles that are the most interesting. 


AK: I love that. Kind of like our conversation!

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Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet is the author of The Greenhouse and Tulips, Water, Ash. Her poems have appeared in journals including Boulevard, Plume, Zyzzyva, and Kenyon Review and anthologies including Nasty Women Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She leads writing workshops in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco and hosts the Portland reading series Lilla Lit. 

Annie Kim is the author of Eros, Unbroken (winner of the 2019 Washington Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2020 Foreword INDIES Poetry Book of the Year) and Into the Cyclorama. She teaches students about public interest lawyering at the University of Virginia School of Law. At DMQ Review, she’s worn a bunch of different hats. Working with the contributors on this issue has been the best one yet.