In an article by culture writer Allyssia Alleyne titled “This Is Your Brain on Tidiness: The Psychology of ‘Organization Porn,’” photographer and Instagrammer Emily Blincoe says, “‘You could take a photo of a bouquet of flowers or you could spend five hours clipping the tops and arranging them by gradient.’ ” 1 And as goofy as that may sound, that distinction in flower-arranging, it seems to me, has everything to do with how poetry books are organized. Which books are vases bursting with lush blooms, and which books are “hyper-organized” arrangements? What’s the range in between, and why does this matter—or seem to matter? Blincoe offers one way of thinking that’s akin to a poet’s: “ ‘It’s just another way of looking at things that other people aren’t willing to put in the time for.’ ” 2 A way of looking that other people don’t take time to do might be considered expertise. I enjoy looking at flowers or tasting wine, appreciate the experience, and even feel such experiences enrich my life, but I don’t have expertise in the realms of flowers or wine.

Alleyne’s article goes on to suggest, “Though the individual components depicted are familiar, the new content requires that the viewer look for more than just literal meaning in the image.” 3 Poets too are going for more than lit­eral meanings. Then, Alleyne points to experimental psychologist Johan Wagemans, who goes further: “‘Usually, perception is after meaning, but when you start playing with images in a way like this, it’s clear that it’s not about meaning, it’s about the special relation­ship between things and how they form a group or a composition.’” 4 Now, we’re really onto something for poetry. While individual poems have meaning, a book is a composition formed by a large group of poems. Tidiness isn’t where we’re going with poetry, but the very materiality of a book—even in a digital format—is not a haphazard mess either. Maybe a rose is a rose is a rose, but a rose among roses or among tulips and orchids is both a rose and part of a bou­quet or garden. I’m interested in princi­ples that underpin a poetry collection’s organization and thereby orchestrate the experience of the book as a book as well as the experience of each poem as part of a book.

Let’s switch analogies. When we talk about our personal space as human beings, we are talking about proxemics. Proxemics is the study of how humans use our bodies in physical space in ways that produce behavior, including verbal and nonverbal social interac­tion. Intimate distance, for instance, is generally reserved for romantic or sexual partnerships, parent-child rela­tionships, and medical examinations. Public distance, on the other hand, is what we experience in the lecture hall or the park. Consider the relatively stan­dardized behavior of people in the con­fined space of an elevator in the United States. If someone is alone, that person is likely to stand near the middle, and if a second person gets on, the first tends to move to a corner. As the space fills, everyone turns to face the doors, trying to avoid eye contact and maintain an accepted social distance of arm’s length, both for their own comfort and as a courtesy to others. Proxemics, then, is a way to understand relationships among physical–social human bodies in the material world.

Though not perfectly analogous, I propose that the proxemics of poetry is a way to understand how poems func­tion together in the material and con­ceptual space that is a book. While the conventions of the physical or digital book tend to establish a relatively stan­dardized physical relationship among poems (e.g., poems are titled, each poem begins on a new page, font type and size remain relatively consistent, perhaps there are sections), relation­ships among one poem and others in a manuscript are not merely a result such material design conventions. Despite material standardization, there exists no agreed-upon organizational stan­dard a poet might easily adopt or adapt. Instead, how poems behave and interact depends on how a book is designed conceptually—which poems belong, how they are ordered, how and when elements repeat, and so on. If we con­sider the book to be a conceptual—as well as material—space in which poems are socializing, then ordering and cohe­sion work together as crucial qualities of a book. Something akin to social proximity and distance among poems allows them to be in conversation with each other and shapes those conceptual interactions in various ways.

That’s not to say that every poetry book must be overtly or tightly unified, for that risks the sort of forced confine­ment that works in an elevator only because the trip is short. It’s tough to sustain intimate distance for long; such a manuscript can feel uncomfortable or small. But without cohesion—a sense of wholeness, a sense of belonging or interaction—it’s tough to sustain the reader’s attention across an entire book. In fact, the mere materiality that puts poems into the same space called a book makes it difficult to create a reading experience that is entirely of poem and poem and poem, just as it is difficult to look at a bouquet as flower and flower and flower. In other words, part of why I argue that poetic proxemics exists is what I call poetic propinquity, or the tendency for readers to discern rela­tionships among poems based on their proximity with each other. As a result, a little cohesion goes a long way in creating just enough but not too much social distance in a poetry book. 

In 2003, Beth Ann Fennelly wrote about the rise of the first-book contest and the resulting winnowing of stylistic variety within first collections. There, she points to her own experience, which echoes mine, of submitting her manuscript Open House and getting the occasional finalist nod, all the while trying “to sculpt a more directive order, adding new poems when they seemed to provide structure, taking out the most stylistically extreme.” 5 She worked toward a level of social distance in which all the poems clicked with seemingly magical connection. Indeed, the epiphany that led me to the sense my first book manuscript was finally really a book involved what Fennelly claims poets did not used to need to do: “give their books a leading title, recurring symbols, and overarching narrative beginning with suffering and ending with redemption.” 6 That’s not to suggest that these practices are tricks, nor that doing these things can disguise lesser poems inside thematic unifica­tion. No, these are techniques that, when used well, can heighten effects of existing propinquity. Of course, even this doesn’t ensure a manuscript will be published, and not all published books use these particular organizational tech­niques. Yet, the choices whether to use these techniques are among many deci­sions that create a book’s breadth and depth as well as its sense of wholeness.

Though Fennelly worries about the winnowing of wildness, she admits “a pleasure derived from the fullness of a well-developed project, the novelistic depth that can be achieved with a tight­er focus, the confidence and psycho­logical comfort we feel as readers in the hands of a writer with a stable, practiced voice.” 7 This sense that everything fits, clicks, or belongs in a given poetry book involves style, form, and content, and this wholeness ultimately emerges from social distance and proximity among poems.

In her essay “Keeping Company: Thoughts on Arranging Poems,” Maggie Anderson, the editor for my first full-length collection, writes of recognizing cohesion in a batch of just thirteen of her own poems. That’s when she knows she’s working on a book. When she can see repeated sounds, images, nouns, or forms, she contends, “Repetition starts me on assembling a manuscript, and it is this I will attend to most closely at the last stages of putting a book together, as I check for repetitiousness.” 8 Manuscript cohesion, then, is affinity but not to the extent of repetitiousness. Importantly, while similarities can play a role, affinity doesn’t depend on similarity. Instead, the poetry book as a literary form allows the sense of inclination and aversion, of association and distinction.

Likewise, Katrina Vandenberg sug­gests record albums and the mix tape offer ways to consider poem relation­ships. Of Ellen Bass’s recent book—about what theme? love and marriage? dailiness? compassion?—Patricia Smith writes, “Indigo is our soundtrack, final­ly, with its addictive and merciless music.” 9 Does this imply a cohesion through voice? Perhaps a particular I and a particular you, and, in Bass’s words, “how even touch itself cannot mean the same for both of us”? “You can create cohesion in a manuscript,” Vandenberg asserts, “by linking poems not just according to the obvious issues of theme, chronology, or similar forms, but also by repeated images, colors, and shapes. You can juxtapose.” 10 Juxtaposition, in fact, seems crucial to my concept of the proxemics of poet­ry because it invites association, and in organizing a manuscript, the poet plays with the possibilities in this type of propinquity. Done poorly, repeated images or forms become tedious, as if a song is being performed by one cover band after another. It’s too much of one thing, or it’s too much the same too close or, if we consider pacing, too quickly. Exercised deftly, however, tech­niques of repetition can create a sense of wholeness, an interconnectedness that is not easily defined, other than by example, by the thing itself in prac­tice. Moreover, repetition can delineate dissimilarity and variety by providing a frame of reference beyond a single poem.

One cohesive book that I have taught several times and about which I’ve also written critically is Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia. These poems emerged after Trethewey was introduced, as a student, to the photographs of prosti­tutes that E.J. Bellocq had taken in the early twentieth century. Based on these surprisingly domestic photographs, Trethewey imagined the character of Ophelia as a light-skinned black woman who moves from Mississippi to New Orleans and ends up working at Countess P—’s “high-class house,” 11 where Ophelia is renamed Violet. One section consists of fourteen letter-po­ems that Ophelia writes, and another section is ten sonnet-like diary-entry poems of fourteen lines. There are a few poems that are not in Ophelia’s voice: the opening poem from the perspec­tive of a speaker looking at a particular photograph to see its compositional connection with John Millais’s painting of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, the poem giving advice in Countess P—’s voice, the poem that describes another par­ticular Bellocq photograph, and the closing poem that imagines the scene of Bellocq taking the book’s cover photo­graph and the woman then “a moment later—after / the flash, blinded—step­ping out / of the frame, wide-eyed, into her life.” 12 Throughout, terminology and metaphor are drawn from photog­raphy. This collection, then, is a dexter­ously organized, novelistic book that brings to life an imagined character. Readers become immersed in the world of this character, in part as a result of social proximity—and varying distanc­es—among poems within sections and across the book’s story. Bellocq’s Ophelia is designed, in part, as a continuous nar­rative even though each poem stands on its own too and some sections have their own type of group propinquity.

Barbie Chang is another collection that, like Trethewey’s, not only brings a character to life but also comments on our cultural moment and history. As the poems’ titles suggest, Barbie Chang parks, runs, shakes, can’t stop watching, gets her hair done, loves evites, vows to quit, and so on. These poems are connected not only by Barbie Chang but also by a distinctive voice and a syntactical style without punctuation. In an interview in The Adroit Journal, poet Victoria Chang says, “I enjoyed word play in The Boss and Barbie Chang because it was fun and it made writ­ing poetry fun for me. … I allowed the language to propel the poems forward instead of me trying to control what they were doing.” 13 The cohesive conceit of the character created openness and unpredictability in a writing process led by language. The last of the four sec­tions consists of seven “Dear P.” poems that incorporate white spaces within the lines—pauses? pivots? personal space between phrases? Chang says of these poems, “I ‘wrote in’ those poems after the manuscript was finished—meaning the middle Dear P. poems were from an old manuscript and I felt that there needed to be more Dear P. poems at the end. But they needed to be differ­ent with caesuras and should feel more alight and haunting. So, I wrote all of those in section four when the book was mostly done.” 14 That addition played with and against existing proxemics in creating the book’s cohesion.

Chang’s next book, OBIT, is largely a series she wrote after her mother’s death and hearing about a documen­tary by that name. She told Kenyon Review, “I loved that word and I went home and after two weeks had written seventy-five of these.” 15 These poems appear as narrow columns with jus­tified margins, like obituaries in the newspaper. The form visually suggests cohesion even if the reader merely flips through the pages without reading for meaning. In addition, these poems form a narrative arc that represents Chang’s own chronological working through various effects of loss. “I actually mostly left the poems in the order in which they were written,” she said in the same interview, “because I wanted to maintain the integrity of the exploration of grief. Not to get math­ematical or anything, but the order of operations was important to me during this process. … In which order does grief come?” 16 That’s not to say that manuscript cohesion is easily achieved by keeping the poems in the order they were written but that, in this case, the poet’s awareness and valuing of proxe­mics—in chronology of composition, in formatting, in voice—created an organizational strategy and conceptual space early on in the process of writing. Not that Chang had the term proxemics in mind but, rather, that she’s thought­ful about interactions among poems.

In an interview at Literary Mama, Karen Craigo, author of Welcome to Humansville, talks of her process in somewhat similar ways: “I give myself projects and I give myself breaks, basi­cally. … The projects have such focus and energy, and the breaks let me regroup, sometimes recover, some­times recalibrate. That’s my process, and if I’ve learned anything over a very herky-jerky writing career, it’s that I should trust my process, or at least lis­ten to what it’s trying to teach me.” 17 Cohesion, then, is a quality of the poet­ry book that emerges from the writing and revising process as well as a reader’s perception based on the type of propin­quity at work. As a result, a book often creates a sense of about-ness that we shouldn’t dismiss. When I mentioned to a workshop leader at a well-known writers’ conference that my recent poems might be part of a larger project, her response was horror over the term project, and any interest in my writing or respect she had for me as a writer seemed to vanish. The sense of about-ness I was articulating by using the term project, however, doesn’t squelch orig­inality, aesthetic integrity, or any given poem’s poem-ness or potential. Instead, the conceptual space of a book offers a place for poetic flourishing, a place for poems to socialize with each other.

Other recent project books include Maureen Alsop’s Mantic, in which each poem explores a type of divination and experiments with language; Lauren Camp’s One Hundred Hungers, about a first-generation Arab-American girl, diaspora, and assimilation; Oliver de la Paz’s The Boy in the Labyrinth, about par­enting neurodiverse children; Kimiko Hahn’s Foreign Bodies, a sort of cabinet of curious objects inspired by a collection at the Mütter Museum; Allison Joseph’s Confessions of a Barefaced Women, a coming-of-age story of a woman of my own generation with life experiences different than my own; Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, a parable about the townspeople of and violence in the imagined Vasenka; Adrian Metejka’s The Big Smoke, which reimagines the life and myth of boxer Jack Johnson; Hai-Dang Phan’s Reenactments, which explores family and cultural history and includes translations of work by other Vietnamese poets; Jessica Piazza’s Interrobang, in which each poem is titled for a phobia or obsession and wordplay abounds; Paisley Rekdal’s Nightingale, with its retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen, which explores the career and creations of fashion designer Alexander McQueen; and my own second full-length book, Aperture, which delves into the lives of real and imagined women and in which I con­scientiously explored potential limits of cohesion. Each of these dozen recent books—and certainly many, many oth­ers—establishes a relatively well-defined conceptual space, though my brief descriptions don’t capture a reader’s rich experience.

Cohesion, of course, can work in various ways and is not merely a book’s about-ness. Lynn Pedersen’s The Nomenclature of Small Things draws more directly from science than my own first book, Constituents of Matter, which I thought cohered almost entirely around science but which I realized only after it was published was far more autobi­ographically cohesive. Mathematician-physicist-philosopher Isaac Newton and biologist Charles Darwin show up in Pedersen’s book, but so do biblical Eve and painter Johannes Vermeer’s woman in blue. In The Nomenclature of Small Things, there is no single subject or point but, instead, as Pedersen writes in the poem “A Catalog of What We’re Not Meant to See,” the sense of “satisfaction or completion just / around the corner or under the pillows / or between the floorboards, something / escaping us in the wind.” 18 

In fact, that may be the way cohe­sion works in most collections that are considered more or less unified. One needn’t ever think of a poetry book as a project in order for cohesion to func­tion as a quality we recognize when we read it, even as it is always escaping from our mental grasp just as we are fig­uring it out. It becomes something we think we know. And then it’s not that—or not exactly what we thought. It’s more. Though it might seem counterin­tuitive for me to claim, cohesion builds into the manuscript both sureness and surprise as the gist is dropped, picked up again, recast, transformed. That’s accomplished in large part by social distance among poems so that a reader learns how to navigate the unfamiliar space of each book. Social distance and interaction allow readers to find their ways through the conceptual space, even as we each may read our own indi­vidual way through.

Let’s take Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas as an example of the relationship of such wayshowing and wayfinding, two concepts I’ve borrowed from the field of design. Part II of Whereas shares its sec­tion title with the book. Titles can work overtly, like directional signs in an unfa­miliar airport—we’re going to whereas, and the structure of the book offers means to get there. The subsection “Whereas Statements,” which responds to the “Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans,” is espe­cially cohesive, with each of the twenty poems beginning with the word where­as in all caps. Repetition is a poetic tech­nique that heightens our wayfinding skills as we both notice and interpret. In an interview with Krista Tibbets, Long Soldier says of this series, “I felt like this was a project of constraints. So, when I sat down to work on this response, there were a lot of constraints that I placed on myself. And one of those was that I wanted all of the pieces to be written, number one, through first person, ‘I.’ But number two, all of them had to be within living memory. I did not want to jump back 100 years.” 19 The inter­connectedness of these poems is greater than a reader might consciously notice or be able to articulate, which is part of the brilliance and beauty of cohesion. This quality allows the reader both to be shown the way and also to find the way through the book. In fact, proxemics is at work even when we read out of order.

Part II is not the end-all and be-all of how Whereas holds together. The third poem, entitled “Three,” consists of four unpunctuated lines formatted on the page as the outline of a square. There’s no other poem formally like it in this book. Cohesiveness allows for variance, whether in form, subject matter, or voice. Some poems in Whereas are right justified, others are centered, many are conventionally left justified, and some are justified on both margins. Some are single spaced, others are double spaced, and others use unconventional spacing or symbols to separate parts. One ends with a mirror-image of a word, anoth­er uses strike-through text, another has text blacked out, and a couple use boxes. There’s so much formal experi­mentation that these surprises end up in conversation with each other—have their own sort of propinquity—and thereby contribute to the book’s sure­ness and interconnectedness as much as to its surprise of form and challenges to literary or textual conventions.

While not the driving force, form and formatting contribute to cohesion—to the experience of the book as a book—in collections like Rachel Eliza Griffith’s Seeing the Body, torrin a. greathouse’s Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations, and Rosebud Ben-Oni’s If This Is the Age We End Discovery. Griffith, who is also an accomplished photographer, includes several black-and-white self-portrait photographs that, as poet Patricia Smith says, “amplify the lyric as the poet contemplates the world beyond absence.” 20 The poet is there in Seeing the Body; the reader can actually see her framed in various spaces and imagine her speaking as I. And while the speak­er’s dead mother is absent in one sense, the poems have everything to do with that absence, so that grief becomes is a presence that is also that absence.

Wound from the Mouth of a Wound includes a couple of blackout erasure poems, paragraph poems, poems with gaps of white space in the lines, and a poem with a line down the middle. Regardless of or in addition to any topical or thematic interactions, these poems in their formal, structure, or visual variety contribute to the sense of the book’s conceptual—or social—space. They orient and organize the experience of reading greathouse’s book. Likewise, Kelly’s book includes blackout erasure poems titled “Dear—,” each of which begins a section, and there are other “Dear—” poems across the collection that are not erasure. As a result, a reader who flips through with­out even reading yet is likely to sense order or organization. While it doesn’t use erasure, Ben-Oni’s collection has numerous poem titles that begin with “Poet Wrestling,” suggesting a motif. Indented stanzas and lines sprawling over some of the pages embody partic­ular movements within the boundaries of the physical and conceptual space of this book. An organizing force is evi­dent, even as it is difficult to label.

What of a book that isn’t a project and adheres to traditional justification and spacing? Is a book of poems ever merely a bunch of poems? Based on humans’ propensity for propinquity, I would argue no, a book is a book is a book even if it is a bunch of poems. As poets and also as readers, we tend to find cohesion, which is not to say we impose it so much as putting poems together necessarily creates interactions among them. Some might argue that all poems written by a given poet would naturally have connections to each other, but poets also experiment and change over time. Even if everything a poet writes is of a piece regardless of the poet’s range, understanding the book as a book—as a poetic form, as a read­ing experience—urges us to consider proxemics as part of the way meaning is made.

In the examples I’ve discussed, cohesion is not an on-or-off quality, and there’s no one way to recognize or achieve it. A poet—or a reader—might create a word cloud to visualize the weight of repeated words and to discern dominant ideas and then play with these words, ideas, and variations. Or the word cloud may make clear repeti­tiousness or thematic oversimplifica­tion that undermines the work. A poet or reader might read aloud the last line of one poem and the first line of the next, looking only at juxtapositions and linkages—indications of social inter­actions or propinquity—from poem to poem. The poet or reader might ask, which poem is too far afield conceptu­ally to hear another’s poem’s question and respond, and which poem is so close to others that it steps on their toes? I feel as if I’m nearing the appro­priate level of cohesion when I both can see a gap where a new poem might belong (where the social distance is much greater than arm’s length) and can tell which poems need to be moved (need more elbow room) or removed (are in the wrong room).

Anderson says, “The poems inside a single collection must keep each other company.” 21 Too much intimacy risks poems circling so tightly—perhaps forced to do so, as if in an elevator—that if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. These poems suffer from cabin fever; they’re anxious, or they’re bored with each other. They need some room to breathe or relax, to do their thing. Yet, excessive expansiveness can leave inter­action indiscernible. Some poems are wandering off; they’ve missed the boat or taken a long walk off a short pier as they lose track of their surroundings. Each poem demands its own space, but the manuscript or the book is not an infinite or empty space. 

The proxemics of poetry offers ways to examine these relationships and suggests how the art and craft of any single-author poetry collection—or anthology, for that matter—work in practice, even when the reader doesn’t read start to finish in order. Proxemics is a tool, if you like that metaphor for craft or for criticism, as much as it is a phe­nomenology of poetry books. Whereas materiality forms the physical book and includes wayshowing and wayfinding cues, proxemics describes the book’s bookness. What’s most amazing to me about the notion of the proxemics of poetry is that it explains how a poem can be itself fully—have its individual meaning and effect—and also be fully part of a larger composition that comes into being on its own terms. 

This article is part of the forthcoming edited collection Demystifying the Manuscript from Two Sylvias Press.

Anna Leahy’s latest books are the poetry collections What Happened Was and Aperture and the nonfiction book Tumor. Her essays have won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. She edits the international Tab Journal, and she been a fellow at MacDowell and the American Library in Paris. https://amleahy.com.

Notes

1. Allyssia Alleyne, “This Is Your Brain on Tidiness: The Psychology of ‘Organization Porn’,” CNN, October 11, 2015, accessed December 26, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/this-is-your-brain-on-tidiness/index.html.

2. Alleyne.

3. Alleyne.

4. Alleyne.