Furniture

I participated in an excellent workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center this summer, and our workshop leader gave us some very good advice about poems. What sticks with me most several months later are two points:

1. A poem is like a room; it needs to have furniture that the reader can comfortably sit upon (concrete images, fresh language, surprising turns or ideas).
2. At the same time, a poem is a fragile space; it cannot survive being overcrowded by too many pieces of furniture.
   

Lately I've been reading the poems I'm cautiously organizing into a manuscript with this lens: where are the pieces of furniture? Are they appropriate to the space the poem creates? Do they overcrowd the room? Is there enough to sit down upon? This has been a helpful -- if at times discouraging -- exercise for me. I notice that I sometimes have the equivalent of a pink corduroy couch, a beige leather ottoman, and a nondescript plastic table in the same room. Rearranging is endless, and sometimes I decide, "Hey, this is a young manuscript. It can't afford a matching set!"

Don't worry. I usually come back to the poem the next day or so and return to editing. The manuscript will be a weird dwelling when it's done, but at least it will make sense to this particular poet!