In her article “The Winnowing of Wildness: On First Book Contests and Style,” poet Beth Ann Fennelly points out that having a mature, unified voice has value in the poetic world. As first book contests take over the publishing of first books, books that project that single, consistent voice have a better chance of catching the eye of a judge. Fennelly makes an interesting comparison between chefs, who have ten years to master their craft and another ten to develop a signature style, and poets, who have the amount of time that it takes to get their degree to master their craft, and now seem to be expected to have developed a unique voice in their first book. As a young poet, this presents a problem. Should I hurry to develop a cohesive voice to meet the pressures of the poetry world, or should I resist those pressures for as long as possible to avoid “winnowing [my] style before it has fully developed” (Fennelly 54)? I believe that I should, as Fennelly advises, “learn to demand the time necessary for style to emerge naturally and fully” (54). Experimenting with various styles and forms will expand my knowledge and mastery of my craft, and through spending time mastering the craft of poetry, a true innate voice will arise naturally.
One of the major pressures on young poets to narrow their diversity so quickly comes from the first book contest. When a young poet submits a book to a first book contest, the book goes through several rounds of readings. First, the contest host will hire other young poets, often grad students, to perform the first round of readings. Fennelly believes that “first books that can be grasped quickly by those doing the preliminary judging. . . are more likely to be passed on to the final judge,” who is usually an established poet (54). This means that, in order to successfully begin their book publishing career with a first book contest, young poets often must spend years working on their first book until, as Eavan Boland points out in her article “Warning, Witness, Presence,” that book “is not truly a first book at all. It is a second book. It may even have elements of a third in it” (55). Boland believes that losing the true first book is actually a problem, since the first book “says so much about the resources of a poetic moment” (55). Beyond simply the loss of truly mature voices that Fennelly warns against, Boland fears that this trend among young poets toward project books has the potential to impoverish the entire movement of young poets.
However, the project book itself is not necessarily a bad thing. There are wonderful project books out there. Joel Brouwer collected a list of some of them for his blog post “Boox”: Installations, by Joe Bonomo; Centuries, by Joel Brouwer; Overlord, by Jorie Graham; Bellocq’s Ophelia, by Natasha Trethewey; and many more. A good project book can be incredibly difficult to write and very rewarding to read. Young poets who attempt to write a project for the sake of winning a first book contest face the prospect of writing a book that feels gimmicky instead of well developed and full. A gimmicky book would be the result of coming up with several arbitrary rules for a manuscript in an attempt to be noteworthy and stand out. Yet Brouwer finds that “poets more and more these days conceive of writing projects and then write poems to fulfill these projects, as opposed to writing poems and later attempting to discern what projects, if any, the poems have made manifest.” If I sacrifice poem quality for the sake of a project, that is not a good thing. This does not simply mean that I should not worry about the way that I construct a collection. Robert Frost supposedly once said that in a book of twenty-four poems, the book itself is the twenty-fifth poem. He was not talking about concept books, but instead meant that collections of poems should be ordered in a way that gives every individual poem a reason for being in the collection.
