I’m counting on you.

Okay, I didn’t pick this month’s poetry slam for all the puns, but I sure could have. I could use a little humor these days, don’t know about you.

Anyway. So about June. I’ve been thinking a lot these days about relations, and connections, and the small and different ways in which things can be connected, and whether those connections are the same or just look the same. So it makes sense that I’ve been reading poems in series. 

What’s a series? 

I bet you were expecting some fancy poetry meaning, but no, the word series has its ordinary meaning here: a thing following a thing, following a thing. One Two Three Four Five is a series. So is January February March April May. BUT: So is mouse, rat, guinea pig, nutria. 

For this month’s poetry slam, we’ll be diving into how to identify and write a poem that’s a series of… well… anything. How connected do your verses need to be? Should you pick a theme? Let’s read a few poems in series..es..es  to start off.

Poems in Series

Some of these are pretty long; others are short and sweet. You’re likely to find something new to love and something else new to strongly dislike. I’ll note what the “series” is for each one so we don’t have to go back through it later.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner – It’s a classic! Look how the series occurs and is marked. Each “chapter break” signals a passage of time, and the entire poem tells a story in chronological order, moving from one scene to the next. This story-slash-poem is easy to follow, and has a clear narrative arc.

My Heart and I – Watch how Browning recycles the first line of each part of the series, so that you could almost track the progress of the heart as a separate poem made of first lines. This series also moves from one point to the other, with the repetition in the first line serving to mark out where in the transition you are. To write a series like this, you can use the tools you tried in last month’s slam, or in Thirteen Ways, by repeating and adjusting a line, or using a word in the same place (first word? last?) every time. You could also try–instead of using progressive descriptions–using progressive words or phrases like red orange yellow green blue purple (I’d explain more but I’m doing that for my sample poem cause it’s Pride).

Twenty-One Love Poems, Poem II and Poem III – You don’t need to read all 21 poems to see what Rich is doing here. This series is linked by theme rather than chronology or progression. In a series like this, you could just list the smaller poems in the order they were written, or you might want to assign each one a color or mood in your mind and order them that way to help the reader move through your series. It may depend on whether you intend your reader to read the poetry as a standalone or as a series (think about how a lot of modern “tv” series are released as a full season now rather than show by show – there are advantages to doing it either way, but make the decision mindfully).

The Waste Land – Well, that’s a whole different mood, isn’t it? This is a long series of long poems, and I don’t blame you if this is one of the ones you want to skim or skip. For one thing, Eliot uses more words than you can fit on a YeahWrite grid here. But here’s the interesting thing about a series like this: the fact that it IS a series makes you think again about each seemingly disparate poem and look for connections. How does the shadow of the red rock relate to Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant / Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants? Using a series format asks readers to consider your poems or verses together, not separately. In effect, this is the opposite of what Rich did with Twenty-One Love Poems. 

From Anagrams [also xiii and iv , more available in the June 2016 issue of Poetry Magazine, excerpted here] – This, too, is a series. I know! It’s hard to read. I wanted you to see it because it pushes the bounds of what a series can do (but if you like it, go read House of Leaves) but it’s clearly a series. Each central segment is an anagram, using all the letters of the one before to say something completely different. The framing segments “analyze” these anagrams as though they were excerpts of a longer work, filling in a chronology around them that’s alien but linked to the anagrams. For a much lower-key take on this type of series, you might write a series of acrostics using the same word to say different things. Or a series of acrostics using consecutive words (red, orange, yellow; or january, february, march)

That’s great and all but those poems are very very very long!

It’s true! I’m a jerkface and I gave you poems that you couldn’t duplicate on a grid. That is a thing that I did. Tell you what: to make up for it I’m going to give you an example of how to write a much shorter series poem using a couple of the techniques I discussed describing the series. As a bonus for you, I’m not a particularly good poet, so this is also going to hopefully become much less intimidating [weeping face emoji goes here].

The first thing I need to do is decide how long I want my poem to be. How much energy do I have, and what kind of time commitment do I want to make? One way to write a series is just to sit in the same place at the same time every day and write a poem about your observations. It’s, um, two days until this post goes live and I honestly am not good at things which require me to make an ongoing commitment, so I’m not going to do that. But you could!

Instead, I’m going to look for inspiration around me. I think I want to write, oh, something a little longer than a sonnet overall. But not super long. Breaking it into segments for a series will also help it be not so long. What if every segment were four lines?  I don’t think I want to use meter or rhyme, but that might be fun to try sometime, a bunch of quatrains with the same rhyme and meter scheme.

Okay. Four irregular lines per stanza. What’s an easy series? Oh right, the rainbow. Let’s free-associate for a minute. Rainbows, Pride, Love, June… yeah I think I have a solid theme here. Since I’m still thinking about House of Leaves after that anagram, I’m also tossing in the name of a nonexistent film that’s referenced in the book. Not that one, the other one: A Brief History of Whom I Have Loved. Or something like that. Exactness doesn’t matter, because I’m not using it to reference anything else, it’s just going to go ahead and give me my title and the unifying theme for my series.

So: six people I have loved, not necessarily romantically, in 4-line references, working in the colors of the rainbow, in order. Let’s give it a shot:

A Brief History of Whom I Have Loved

Red
After you left
it took a very long time
for the roses to dry
in their nooses

Orange
Do you know what this outfit needs?
More hats!
I helped you pack them
in a box wider than the line on the map was long

Yellow
I dissected
the blanket you gave me
Beneath the satin there was an unfaded patch
that reminded me of nothing in particular

Green
I know I said things
so did you
I sewed you a shirt
it was all very Scarborough Fair, wasn’t it?

Blue
There are some words you can’t take back
Released, they make birds
against a sky so clear
it must have been painted

Purple
We could speak to each other
with more than our hands
if you’d put down your ego
and pick up a phone

I’m really glad I didn’t try to make that rhyme, it would have turned into 88 Lines About 44 Women. Some things I think I would edit: I’m not sure that having the colors as the breakpoints for the series works, maybe I should have just let the colors be images in the poems. That would mean adjusting some things, though, so that readers could see that there’s an actual progression through the colors. On the other hand, I could have kept the notion of colors to myself and used it as sort of an invisible prompt, letting the title unify the poems like “clearly 1, 2, 3, etc are different people, so that’s the series.” I may have packed too many prompts in here for good poetry but I’m a little stressed and also, did I mention not a good poet? I could have had one of our good poets do this, but a) reading good poetry all the time can make it hard to see the good in your own work; and b) I don’t need it in a couple days, I need it now. They like to do things like “edit” and “polish” which, um, is probably why they’re good poets and I’m not. That and the part where I wait for it to be Deadline Day to start writing. Anyway.

So there’s a poem, folks. Can you see all the ways the series relates to itself? Can you see the ways it progresses? Now go forth and fifth and sixth and write your own.

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me