Is it me, or has the short lyric gradually vanished from American lit journals? It seems as though long narrative poems are making a comeback. This really worries me, mostly because I enjoy short, compact lyrics over longer narrative poems. Ths short lyric seems to be alive and well in Britain, however, at least based on the few British poets I’ve read lately. This trend worries me, primarily beacuse much of my book-length ms contains small, compact lyrics. More and more it seems that publishers prefer more prosaic poems that think (what I like to call cerebral verse) rather than poems that show via imagery. Whatever happened to the golden rule anyway . . . show don’t tell?
I’m wondering about book-length manuscripts, more specifically how a collection of poems should read. For years, I simply wrote poems, hoping that at some point I would publish them (individually, that is). In fact, I never even considered publishing the poems together until someone suggested I submit a manuscript to a chapbook publisher. I took their advice, without any luck, unfortunately. But I was persistent, so I submitted it again . . . and again . . . and again. And, eventually someone decided to publish them. At the time, I worried about it a bit, but I was lucky because this particular publisher (like many chapbook publishers) didn’t expect chapbooks to contain a theme or motif. Now, because I am interested in publishing a full-length collection (mostly because it seems like the next logical step), I find myself struggling with this idea, wondering if I have a collection on my hands or simply a bunch of unrelated poems from varying stages of my writing career. Surely, I must not be alone. I’d imagine that many beginning poets (perhaps even the majority) find themselves in my situation since they (presumably) spent their time writing poems without ever imagining book publication as even a possibility. I just don’t know where to go from here. The manuscript as it stands contains thirty poems, all of which contain a similar mood. However, within the ms, there are many different modes (dramatic monologues, odes, long narratives, short lyrics, etc.). Also, some of the poems are very personal (first-person narratives, while others are more detached (written in the third person). I am wondering . . . should the manuscript simply be comprised of poems that contain a similar mood? Or should the ms contain poems that progress in some way (that is, poems that move the reader in some logical direction?