You want to figure out exactly which of these animals you’re working with before you get to the job of taming and wrangling it. On the longer side are the full-length collections, which are usually 40-80 pages. On the shorter side are the chapbooks, clocking in around 15-30 pages. The standards for these manuscript sizes can vary slightly depending on the preferences of whichever press or publisher you end up working with, but there are accepted industry-wide size ranges for each. If you were to include all of the poems from this pile of finished pieces in your manuscript, how long would it be? There are generally two length-based categories for poetry books with important distinctions: chapbooks and full-length collections. However, the how-to guide below from the poetry editors at Tell Tell will give you a map to follow as you figure out what works best for your poems, as well as important points and possibilities you’ll want to consider along the way.įirst, you want to take stock of exactly what you have, both lengthwise and poem-wise. This is an entirely subjective process that is incredibly personal to each poet. Here’s how you do it.īut before we start, a quick disclaimer: there is no one right way to arrange your poetry collection. You’re going to turn a scattered bunch of stand-alone pieces into a cohesive collection that follows a narrative arc from the first to the last poem-a whole that is greater than its parts. Now it’s time to take the next step toward constructing and publishing your own beautiful book baby. You’ve written and revised pages and pages of poems. So you have a pile of finished poems on your desk, now what?Īt this point, you’ve probably already been daydreaming about what it would be like to hold a whole book of your own poems in your cramped, ink-stained writer’s hands.
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