I’m sitting in what must look like a rat’s nest—earmarked and torn pages tossed in heaps of a minimal order. I go by feel here because, frankly, logic is lost on this scale. It’s intuition and intention that lead me from poem to poem to poem. I’m trying to make a book.

Elle asks, “does order even matter? When I pick up a book of poems I usually flip through and couldn’t be pressed to notice its shape.” Ah yes, different readers will approach a book differently, but I’m at work on stage construction so the play will be a little more believable. Putting together a book is like putting together a juggernaut of a poem. It feels unwieldily.

I’ve put together a number of chapbooks and these seem fairly easy. They can cohere almost entirely and the mysterious arc is actually not that mysterious. But a 60-70 page manuscript, in my case, does not so easily come together. I’ve worked it over in my mind for months and months, played with pages, published a bunch of the poems and then I hit a wall. I wish I could just hand over the project to a more experienced poet and see what they would come up with. But I know I have to something solid before I’ll get any helpful feedback.

So, in my half-blind attempts at following intuition the thing begins to snowball and, at first, it is exhilarating. But then we’re picking up speed and suddenly we’re picking up more than snow—a lamp and coffee mug, the broken keys of a typewriter, old shoes, yesterday’s leftovers, bottles and bags and sand. When it finally clunks to a halt I’ve got an ugly mess before me. Hence the rat’s nest.

At these points I pause. Take a breath. Drink a beer. Smile at my wife and son. And then I come back again with a little more determination. Making a book is hard work and it is what will allow any reader to experience the poems in the way I want them to. I know I have the pages. I’ve culled the weak poems. So now I just have to keep moving toward that bigger vision. With patience.