POETICS Podcast: The Art of Book Composition, host Ben Rockwood

This week I hand the microphone to Ben, who comes at poetry books from the vantage of a reader and a designer. His argument is that a collection is a mixtape. You choose your listener, you choose your emotion, you choose your songs, and then you spend hours on the sequencing, because sequence is where the affection lives.Along the way he offers the three S’s he uses to describe any book he loves (style, story, structure), a defense of Infinite Jest‘s endnotes as a tennis match, and two poetry examples worth your afternoon: Janée J. Baugher’s The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, in which every poem is a numbered footnote, and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which he reads aloud twice, once as prose and once as free verse, to show you the poem hiding in the punctuation.If you cannot describe your manuscript in a single log line, this one is for you. Get full access to Bainbridge Island Press at bainbridgeislandpress.substack.com/subscribe