Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “Natura” and discuss how individual poems fit into a poetry collection.
Stephen’s poetry collection Noctis Terrores is available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and and then we talk about its key technique. This season, you’ll hear poems from my book Noctis Terrores.
Today I’ll read “Natura”, and we’ll talk about how individual poems fit into a poetry collection. So here’s the poem:
Natura
Sleeping illegally on McClellan Island
with two sleeping bags and one canoe.
Boats roar. Bridge traffic. Chattanooga lights
blink off and on above limestone cliffs.
The river slaps the pilings and moves past.
Collin wakes after midnight on the dock,
squints in gray shale light. I’m sitting up, feral,
one arm braced against the weathered boards.
I stare until he speaks my name. You looked
like you didn’t know who I was, he says.
Like you might kill me in my sleep.
Discuss:
I’ll be honest, I don’t think this is an exceptional poem. But I think it works in the collection in context, and when you put together a poetry collection, some poems are that way.
So this book that I’m reading from this season is called Noctis Terrores. That’s Latin for Night Terrors. There are about 11 poems that are part of this subcollection of night terror poems.
And if you’re kind enough to buy the book or you’re willing to go fishing through the podcast episodes to hear the set, here are those poems:
- “One Scream,” Episode 1
- “Canyon Vigil,” Episode 8
- “Natura,” this one
- “Nocte Visita,” Episode 14
- “Ghost Story,” 15
- “Notes from a Grocery Store Psychic”, 20
- “Lavender Soap,” 23
- “Pudicitia, Episode,” 30
- “Oratio Santi Francisci Ave Maria,” Episode 31
- “Oremus,” 32
- “Solitudo,” 43
Together, these form a kind of undercurrent in our imagined speaker’s life stretching across the collection. They give us this sense that there’s something wrong or there’s some kind of trauma or past experience that leads him into bad love and angst situations.
Now, poetry books are weird. They’re not novels, and they’re not memoirs. There’s really no guarantee that the speaker of each of these poems is the same person, or that the speaker is actually the poet, or that any of it really happened. You can have a collection with multiple speakers, but when you put them all together in one book, there’s an implied narrative.
The way that you fit the poems together creates that plot arc that we all learned in English classes in high school. The action rises until some climax, and then there’s resolution. Maybe it’s a deep question or a revelation that’s driving the plot arc instead of an external conflict like chasing terrors through Paris or something, but there’s some unifying theme.
Some poets will do this in sections rather than across the book. So section one might have a certain plot arc, section two might be different, but for Noctis Terrores, it really stretches across the whole collection, and I want to build this recurring sense that a trauma is informing the decision making of this composite speaker.
Even the other persona poems share a worldview with this regular speaker.
- We’ve got “The Ghost of Fremont Canyon,” in which a Native American woman shares a history of sexual abuse or coercion.
- “Petroglyphs,” in which a historical figure talks about how much he loves living on the Earth–nature’s also one of the few sweet influences in our composite speaker’s life.
- And we’ve got “Understanding English Poetry,” a poem about Matthew Arnold and how he might have written his very sad poem Dover Beach on his actual honeymoon. It’s got this line, “Nights have always been hard, and he has these Greek poems rolling in his head.”
So even though these are set in different places with different speakers, there are a couple of similarities to our composite speaker’s life.
Alright, so what’s the takeaway for you? Well, if you’re putting together a collection, look for cohesion, and I absolutely hate to say this because I’m a creative writing teacher and not a literature teacher, but look for themes.
What are the similarities or the big ideas or the connections? How do they fit together, or maybe even pull against each other?
You can shape a narrative through arrangement, and it’s a really cool thought exercise to see what the guiding themes and the movement of the poems are throughout a book.
Let’s hear “Natura” one more time and get a feel for who this speaker, this composite speaker, is. Here’s the poem.
Natura
Sleeping illegally on McClellan Island
with two sleeping bags and one canoe.
Boats roar. Bridge traffic. Chattanooga lights
blink off and on above limestone cliffs.
The river slaps the pilings and moves past.
Collin wakes after midnight on the dock,
squints in gray shale light. I’m sitting up, feral,
one arm braced against the weathered boards.
I stare until he speaks my name. You looked
like you didn’t know who I was, he says.
Like you might kill me in my sleep.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, look at a poem or two that is solid but not quite stellar on its own, and then compare it to the rest of the poems you’re working on.
Do you have any other poems or clumps of lines from something that’s not quite working, but if you put them together, it’d make something bigger? Maybe you could make a segmented poem out of them.
Could they work as companion poems if they’re paired next to each other in a collection?
Maybe you dealt with the same topic matter more convincingly in another poem, so unfortunately, it’s time to let this one go and send it upstate to the farm.
That’s what my writing group calls our slush fund or our scrap pile, and I’ll tell you more about that in another episode.
Outro
Thanks for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt. This season I’m reading poems from my book Noctis Terrores.
It’s available on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description. You can support the show by picking up a copy.
I’ll see you next week.