From last year's April is Poetry Month--2025


How to Organize a Book of Poetry

Collection Process:
Call out, always at night. This is not a time to practice democracy. Recognize the art of prejudice. Set eligibility standards and adhere to them. If a poem sheds tears, squeaks out a whining sound, or dares to reach for a twentieth-century protest placard, don’t indulge in rewrite process therapy--get rid of it.

Selection Politics:
Be a good poet. Love your little poems. But they’re grown now, they need lives of their own. Let them pay rent. Give them the car keys. With closed eyes, turn them into word groups—little seeds that grow beyond their expectations. Make them line up along a wall. Give them numbers instead of names. Make them wear sunglasses, so you can’t see their eyes. Identify those that no longer belong. Embrace what remains. Give them all the same name—something that sounds like past and future generations have collided in the present moment.

Leadership Profundity:
Inform selected poems what is expected of them. Those who argue or become difficult do not belong in a collection of word sounds, styles, and forms. Free them, immediately, like you save a bird-chick with brand new feathers—just throw it into the sky and watch it fly away. For these special word-beings, no book is necessary. Reject sentimentality.

Compliance for Eternity:
“Book-poems” will stay with you. They are collected soul-pieces. See to it, they never forget where they came from. Give them valid, renewable passports. Comb their hair, brush their teeth, make sure their clothes are clean, and their shoes are dry. You have only one moment in time to accomplish this. How they look when they leave the pen is how they’ll look forever.

Birth and Death:
Family perpetuity is in your hands. Poetry collected in one place sleeps behind its poet, like an army. Once you’ve filled emptiness and called it a book, pray for its future instead of a face.

Purpose and Loss—book collections reincarnated:
1941—Mama witnessed every poem she’d ever written disappear in smoke and rubble. She hid herself, future poems, and family inside Kazakhstan. She survived and wrote nazi-terror-poetry on the palm of her hands. She mourned her loss forever, but proclaimed: "We’ll return". Mama collected remains for the rest of her life, but the little poems she freed and tossed into the sky joined The Six Million.

The World to Come:
Everything collected comes back. To this day, I remember Mama turning her dead book pages, while she slept, dreaming them back to life and gathering passages she poured into the cemetery. She lovingly kept missing pieces in the center of her body. It was how she organized her book, the story within, poetry sprinkled into the universe.

Even now, I turn her pages in my dreams, waking long enough to put them all together—many sparks shining as one. Organizing one collection after the other, poetry stacked to the stars, poem upon poem.

(c) 2025 Tovli