“Making Manuscripts: An Irregularly Braided Conversation,” featuring Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (Poetry ’05) and Annie Kim (Poetry ’09)
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet, a 2005 graduate, was recently featured in the DMQ Review. Read an excerpt of Stonestreet’s conversation with 2009 graduate and poet Annie Kim below:
Making Manuscripts: An Irregularly Braided Conversation
LGS: When I was first trying to put a pile of my poems together in a manuscript—I’m not much of a crier, but I tried and tried, and I cried every time. Really. It became very clear that I had no idea what I was doing. How did these poems talk to each other? Did they even belong together? Did I even have anything to say? I had been thinking in terms of individual poems for so long, and there was no obvious form or narrative to tie them together. Or that’s what I thought. Now I believe that, as I insist to students when I teach, you may feel like there’s nothing connecting your poems, but each of them comes from the same consciousness. You have obsessions, and ways of thinking and perceiving the world, of making patterns; that is inescapable. And so those poems do talk to each other, more than you realize—they can’t not. Your job is to find out how.
The last semester of my MFA, I studied with Marianne Boruch, who is brilliant. I wanted to understand ordering poems, so she had me map out the flow of a bunch of first books. It was like following a trail through the forest with a magnifying glass, just mapping step by step. And I was suddenly able to order my work. In retrospect, that jibes with how I’ve ended up making anything I write. I try to get out of my own way and trust my internal compass. Eventually, it’s time to figure out what’s going on, what this new thing wants to be. I sort of reverse-engineer that understanding—being open to what’s working, finding the energy. Can the poem strike that spark elsewhere? And if I’m editing someone else’s manuscript, or teaching, then I also need to translate that intuitive process into a discussion of craft, without being overly prescriptive or killing the mystery.
AK: I do that reverse-engineering, too. You said two things I want to touch on. The first is the idea that everything that comes out of us as poems is related. I firmly believe that. And I think that more than anything else we’ll probably talk about, that intuition, that trust, is crucial. Because if it comes out of you from a genuine place versus, say, “I have to fulfill a promise that someone’s given me,” everything is going to be related.
How they relate is a big piece. But for me, it’s also about the arc of the manuscript and the eventual “so what?,” the “what happened next?”
LGS: Yes. And that can happen outside what we usually think of as narrative; it’s more like mapping movement of thinking and feeling, how a consciousness evolves over the course of the book.
AK: Right. I don’t know if “clarity” is the right word for me here, but it’s making that pencil line darker and darker. Making more and more of a contour so that consciousness becomes more developed on the page, more real.
LGS: Self-aware but not self-conscious. We’ve talked about therapy before—how you get that deepening understanding over time. There can be similar movement through a book of poems, even if the aim of the book is different.
Having struggled so much with what eventually became Tulips, Water, Ash, I was nervous about putting together the manuscript of The Greenhouse. But it was such a different experience. All that practice and analysis Marianne had me do had soaked in and fermented. I’d finally ordered the earlier book in a way that worked; maybe I could do it again. And The Greenhouse had a strong chronological element—all the poems at least touch on the intense early years of parenting, which gave me a default to push against. I listened to my intuition, and there was something there to hear. And when I backed up and tried to figure out why I had made certain choices, they still made sense.
So I’ve just finished the manuscript of Annihilation, and I’m at a stage of casting about, seeing if anything happens. For me, that can mean very little happening for a long time. I mean, I’m still putting notes in my journal and dumping them into a folder and not looking at them. Eventually, I have to trust that something new will happen, and I will write actual poems again, and they will be somehow different from my old work, and I can follow their threads to make more poems. This gets less stressful each time, since it somehow happened before, right?
Read the conversation in its entirety here: https://www.dmqreview.com/stonestreetkim-spring21
