Singles Not Albums: Why I’m Not Writing a Book Right Now

Note to self: The world has to have room for singles, otherwise we wouldn’t have Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown 7”. The same rule applies for poetry.

I have great news: I’m not working on book right now. And it feels so good.

A couple of years back, in March 2020 just as Biceps was releasing I had coffee with my partner and we chatted about the projects we were working on. When she asked what I had lined up, I told her I wanted to spend the next six months or so working on another collection. I had a concept for the book in my head, could see its shape and had a working title I liked a lot. I could see the outline of some of the poems I wanted to be in it and could see how they’d flow into one another.

Biceps was a tight book conceptually, setting out a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. I wanted the follow-up to be a bit less rigid, more thematically linked than narratively linked. I knew this would be a different way of working, setting out with more of an overall idea in my head than just exploring organically, but I figured that’d be an interesting challenge to try.

I tried it. It didn’t work.

I kept trying to write poems with one eye on how they might fit into the themes of this fictional collection in my head. Whether or not the poems were good, I’d be second guessing: does this fit what I’m trying to do? How would it work alongside the other pieces I’m working on? Or I’d just have a vague outline, waste time thinking “I want to write something about x”, rather than just seeing where the pen led me.

The pandemic didn’t help. People are where poetry comes from – without seeing people and witnessing the poetic moments in their lives I found it a lot harder to find starting points for new work.

But it turns out, I did work. I read a lot of poetry and I wrote a lot of poetry. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trawling back through my notebooks and files and there are plenty of poems there – not just from the past couple of years but stretching back further than that too. I’d put a lot of them in the digital drawer and forgotten about them because they didn’t quite fit the concept in my head for book two.

But here’s the real joy: I actually like quite a lot of them quite a lot. And I’m a better writer now than I was when I wrote them… so I’ve been going back over several of these older poems and editing them. It feels like giving them a haircut after years in the wilderness – a few quick, bold cuts and there they are!

Left: The poem as Robin Williams in Jumanji when he escapes the board game after years in the jungle. Right: The poem as Robin Williams in Jumanji when he escapes the bathroom after a good shave.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been giving these secret shaves to ten old poems and now they look shiny and new. I’ve focused on them one at a time as individual poems – figuring out what needs nipping and tucking to make them work, without thinking about them in the context of a wider project.

That change to a macro lens has been totally freeing – allowing me to finally give the poems the attention they need and get finished drafts I’m happy to share with others. I’ve also been focusing on sending them out to journals and magazines – something I’ve historically been lax about – I don’t know if they’ll want them but I’m going to keep sending them.

And the next time someone asks me what I’m working on, the answer will be a poem not a book.