Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems

Abstract

How should a book of poems be organized, and in what ways does it matter? How have poets shaped their books and what are effects of those shapes? Because a collection of poems is sequential, not simultaneous like visual art, and even though many readers don't read poems in order, understanding a book's design is a way to deepen one's experience of book. I like idea of gesture (Latin, to carry) as a trope for a book's organization: How does book carry itself, and how does it move reader? While many poets do this intuitively, and readers are highly disparate in their practices, I would like to try to make these principles explicit. In other words, I will ask how organization can provide a richer, more (to use Roland Barthes' term) experience for reader. Poets have always structured their books of poems, Neil Fraistat points out in Poems in their Place; Ovid, Horace, Petrarch, Virgil, Milton, Pope, Dickinson, Whitman, and Yeats were among those known to have paid attention to what Fraistat terms contexture: the contextuality provided for each poem by larger frame within which it is placed, intertextuality among poems so placed, and resultant texture of resonance and meanings (3). Robert Frost, C.R Cavafy, Adelaide Crapsey, and Wallace Stevens are modern poets whose collections' contextuality revealed new insights about their work. In case of Sylvia Plath's Ariel, Marjorie Perloff shows that book organized by Ted Hughes emphasizes death and self destruction, while book as originally organized by Plath reveals her outrage at Hughes' adultery. Looking at Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, John Berryman's Dream Songs, and Robert Lowell's Life Studies, among others, M.L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall argue that modern poetic sequence fulfills need for encom passment of disparate and often powerfully opposed tonalities and energies (3) through a liberated lyrical (11). One might draw upon Roland Barthes' notions of writerly and readerly texts to understand how structure complicates meaning: has poet created a text that allows reader maximum pos sibility? Barthes insists, the goal of literary work (of literature as