This question has come up at some of my readings this month for Tree Fall with Birdsong, so I thought it might be worth blogging about. The question usually arises from my discussion during a reading about how some of the poems are related or about the section of the book that a poem appears in. I often talk about a book section as a poem cycle, and that leads people to wonder: should they read the book cover to cover in order, or is it okay to skip around and read poems individually, which seems to be a common practice, at least of those who ask the question.
My answer is, yes. It’s okay to skip around, and yes, many poetry collections are meant to be read in sequence. That is to say, most poets spend a lot of time and thought on arranging a collection in a particular order. It is not just chronological, though with my collections there is often a somewhat chronological order to the sections of the book. Individual poems, though, might have been written at very different times. I might write one poem early in a book’s history, and then come back to that theme again much later and write poems that go with one or more earlier poems. Or I might move poems around between sections to weave certain themes together, rather than having all of one theme in one section.
When putting a collection together, I think a lot about how one poem might lead into the next poem, and I want them to speak to one another in an order that is consciously arranged. I’m a poet who wants the experience of reading the collection in order to be meaningful and to lead to new insights that you might not get if you read poems individually. Yet I also acknowledge that many readers prefer to read that way (or do that out of habit), and that is all right.
After all, poems are written as individual pieces. They are meant to stand on their own and often appear initially in a completely different context, in a literary magazine, for instance. As editor of Poetry South, I also spend time thinking about the order of each issue and how poems speak to one another in that context, so I hope some readers will the magazine in order, too. I’m always mildly annoyed with magazines that organize their contributors alphabetically — that’s convenient, both for the editor and for the reader who wants to find a poem by a particilar poet (but that’s what the table of contents is for) — but I still like to curate the experience.
I like to think of a poetry collection and even a poetry magazine as analogous to an art exhibit. If a gallery owner hung paintings alphabetically by artist or by title, that would be within their rights, but it would also be somewhat disappointing. There’s so much more to discover when art or poetry is arranged intentionally so that the individual pieces can be in conversation with each other.
In my interview in Southern Review of Books with C. T. Salazar, we got into a discussion of how the poems in “Tree Fall” echo one another with certain lines or phrases coming back recursively in each. If you don’t read the poems in order, then you likely won’t catch this use of repetition, and you won’t see how the phrases evolve over the course of the sequence. Sometimes I think of a book as one long poem in several movements. The composition of the book took place individually over a long period of time, but the book coalesces when the connections between poems begin to emerge and an order gradually emerges.
But in the end, it is your book once you buy (or borrow) a copy. If you want to skip around and read the poems that strike your fancy first, by all means, go ahead. I would encourage you to reread it at least once by reading cover to cover, but maybe you want to do that only after you’ve discovered your favorite, so you then can see them in a new light upon rereading. Or read it cover to cover once, and then go back to your favorites to read again and again. A poem should stand on its own and be meaningful without any additional context. A collection adds to and deepens that meaning by arranging the context and providing the reader more to go on, if they are willing to read it in order.
At least my poetry books are arranged this way. I’m sure there are other poets who don’t do that as much. I see more collections these days that don’t include sections and simply present the reader with a single series of poems with no pauses or breaks. Maybe some of these poets expect readers to read out of order, so they don’t worry about sections or cycles. Or maybe they care equally about the order, but don’t want to indicate where to pause or how to group the poems. Poets are not a monolith, after all, and we all have our own ideas on how a collection can come together.
Kendall Dunkelberg 