Poetry Plan 2012

I've been inundated with work and busy with the holidays, so I haven't been writing poems. Last week, to remedy the situation, I took out all the finished poems I have to see how close I am to a new manuscript. The good news is that I am closer than I had thought. The bad news is that there is, as of now, no obvious way to organize these disparate poems.

For both my first book and chapbook, I wrote poems with themes and structures in mind. I'm that kind of person, in general: I like structure and form and repetition. But I didn't have any cohesive ideas after I finished my first book-length book, so I just wrote orphan poems, and now I have a stack that is nearly manuscript-length (although stacks go up, so that should be manuscript-high, perhaps?). Anyway, at first, the morass panicked me, but I calmed down and realized this is just a new opportunity for me to try and suss out a structure or themes after the fact, instead of before. A new challenge.

Earlier this year I wrote a post about books of poems with overall guiding principles and/or themes versus poetry books without, and at that time, I found some resources showing ways to organize a manuscript (scroll down to the bottom of that post for the resources). It's time for me to review those resources and find a guiding principle or two. I'm short 10-20 pages for a complete manuscript, so I'll try to identify my organizational structure and then write what I need to knit together the poems I've already got into some kind of cohesiveness.

So that's my poetry plan for 2012. What's yours?