Saturday, January 18, 2025

10 am - 3 pm $55 - preregistration required - limit 10 students

In-person at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse, Placitas, NM

Organizing, sculpting, curating, composing, designing, arranging, mapping…any of these words could describe the process of organizing a poetry manuscript. There is an art to assembling a poetry book from a manuscript.

How do you know what to include and what to leave out?

How do you determine an effective order of poems to reflect what your poetry manuscript says?

What about the title page and the book title?

Ordering poems is a way of mapping the landscape, walking the labyrinth and listening to the landscape of the poems. In writing the book, the poet sets the relationship between the poems, the book, and the reader.

Join Jules and John as we review a few poetry books with a good ‘thru-line,’ or order, and experiment with what our poems are trying to say when we order our poetry manuscript. There will be class breaks to walk the labyrinth landscape on the beautiful acreage of Jules’ Poetry Playhouse.

We will review a narrative arch, or thru-line, thematic sections, intuitive, logical, and best practices for placing strong and weak poems, what to cut and what to keep, and the relationship of manuscript poems in order to attract your publisher and readers’ attention.

Bring a poetry manuscript or collection in progress (minimum 12-15 poems) that is printed out with one poem per page, single-sided.

Class will have a lunch break (bring a lunch or order from Placitas Pizza, or shop the Merc Grocery, both nearby). Snacks and beverages are provided during short breaks throughout the class.