Who knew it that the most difficult part of creating a chapbook would be the ordering of the individual works? I have had three separate, what I thought were complete, manuscripts since I started to order my poems in the chapbook. I have added and subtracted poems from the manuscript during this process. Producing the actual poems was the easy part. Some poems didn’t fit how I wanted them to, and some I liked, so I made them fit. I tried to use a broad, loose theme so that I could produce poems as I usually do then make them fit into the theme, versus writing toward a given theme. I think it worked fairly well but when it came to narrowing down my chapbook, tightening up the theme and developing sections within in that theme made things a bit tough. I would have liked to produce a chapbook as tightly wound as Kevin Oberlin’s, Spotlit Girl but I didn’t want to write to a theme or a form and be limited in my production of poetry.
The title of my chapbook is, Collected Trepidation, which is also the theme. It is a collection of works that induce my own personal trepidation. I set out at first with a universal idea, what induces trepidation in people, but that idea I thought was too loose so I personalized it. The collection contains three loosely defined sections consisting of four or five poems. I included the sections to bring some unity to the project, even more so than a chapbook already calls for. The sections come in an order, an order that I hope fits the theme of the chapbook. I tried to give the project a personal feel to begin with, very personal topics. I then went a bit broader with the second section and closed with a personal section. My hopes are that the sections work this way and within each section I tried to be a bit more chronological.
The idea of chronological order came to me after reading Maggie Anderson’s essay in Ordering the Storm. I mean chronological order as in the poems themselves versus when they were written. I never thought of ordering the poems in a collection in this way but I think it works for the first and third sections of the project, working very well in the third section. I think the idea of chronology is easy to follow when reading the final section of the project.
With the idea of ordering poems, I’m not totally sure that my first and final poems of the entire chapbook do what I hope them to do. I’m not sure they do anything. My hopes are that the first poem sets the tone of the speaker as a, or the writer, almost like it has come to compiling a chapbook after all else. This idea in itself calls for trepidation, maybe. The last poem doesn’t bring closure to anything and leaves possibilities open for maybe getting a dog and having kids, that’s what it’s supposed to do. I guess we’ll see if it works at all.
Overall I’m still on the fence about the finished product, which I’m sure will change once I read again. I think because of the fact that I have not been writing that long that my style is still in development. From the beginning of this project to now I have evolved as a poet. I’m still not totally sure that I can call myself a poet but there has been some growth. Because of this some of the poems I wrote early on in the project, can be much better, will be much better, but the version included in the chapbook I’m not necessarily satisfied with. As one reads through the entire chapbook the evolution is evident. The reading I was doing while working on the project can be seen in the individual poems. I now use more poetic devices (assonance, consonance, rhyme, etc.) that I didn’t use early on and in places there could be more. The insight from Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry helped me to manipulate the actual text to achieve a desired result, which I had been exposed to but on a very small scale.
Collected Trepidation is my attempt to collect trepidation, induced trepidation, and my hopes are it will produce trepidation.
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