Small Pointed Things: Erica McAlpine
Erica McAlpine on 'project books' and putting together her new collection
I have always admired ‘project books’. You know what I mean: the poetry collection that coheres around a central motif while still allowing its individual poems to breathe—like a prism separating one ray of light into forty or fifty different colourful strands. The sort of book you write in a specific place, at a particular time, about a single event. A book where every poem looks the same, or has the same form, but changes ever-so-slightly in ways that feel meaningfully small. A book about one important year, or person, or feeling.
My first book of poems vaguely gestured at this kind of wholeness. It was a set of Horatian-like poems interspersed with actual translations of Horace. But I knew the truth: it was also a collection of every good poem I’d written in the decade leading up to the book. Afterwards, I tried to imagine what a real ‘project book’ might look like. I was free to start something fresh and singular—the jar was empty for filling. I toyed with the idea of writing a book of odes—poignant but witty, still in the second-person style of Horace—in which I could dole out life advice to all my friends in England and America. I wrote ‘What Fires,’ metaphorically addressed to a love-sick bougainvillea, in this vein. But reading it, I felt the hook wasn’t in the address so much as the flower, or the idea of it. So I pressed the flower analogy—’Love-lies-bleeding,’ ‘Snowdrops’—to see if my budding book was in fact a giant poetry bouquet.
Thank goodness it wasn’t. One morning I found myself fleshing out, in longer rhyming stanzas, a couple of important arguments between me and my husband; ‘Bats and Swallows’ and ‘Ladybirds’ felt like they were written in a slightly different key. There was also an incidental moth poem (R.I.P., favourite sweater) along with another about a spider, a scorpion, and a carpenter bee. Was there going to be an entomology theme? But the spider poem was really about my becoming a mother, I knew (c.f. ‘her spooling abdomen’). And another poem I was writing, ‘The Fountain,’ was also about this transformation of self, which got me started on Ovid. There were a few stories from his Metamorphoses I had always wanted to transpose—the myth of Arethusa (also about a fountain), and Baucis and Philemon (about, among other things, a marriage)—and so it seemed wise to pursue these leads simultaneously. Around that time, I also starting writing poems to, and about, my children; I think I was testing out whether motherhood and poetry could comfortably co-exist. By now I was twenty poems into my new collection, and I couldn’t keep my subjects straight. In searching for motifs, I’d started a miscellany.
Poems themselves are often associative. As Frost said, like ‘ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.’ The same was proving to be true for the poetry collection. I think there is a conflict between cohesion and associative wondering. The ode becomes flower becomes bug becomes metamorphosis becomes motherhood. Where is it all leading? That’s when I realised this wasn’t a ‘project book’ so much as a book’s project. The task wasn’t dividing a single ray into multiple strands, but arranging all the prismatic colours bouncing off the walls into the semblance of a single room. I noted that this was not dissimilar to another challenge I understood better: accommodating multiple rhymes across a closed sestet or stanza. When you start a rhyme, no matter how rogue, you have to trust the partnering complement is near. In the poems to my husband like ‘Bats and Swallows,’ I had already discerned an analogy between rhyme and marriage; but the figure held for the book, too.
Gathering together the poems in Small Pointed Things felt like tossing up a fistful of feathers and trusting the bird would fly. I printed all the poems out and laid them over our kitchen table. The four edges of the table became the book. I allowed myself to ignore my ‘subjects’ and look for patterns. There were three poems containing orange balls: the clementines should go with the pumpkins should go with the peaches. Here were two fountains, and here were three trees. Here were all the poems without any things, the poems of theories and ideas. Here were the poems under the moon. Flank the whole with birds—swallows at the beginning, blackbirds at the end.
There is something pleasing about a little poem all on its own, pretending not to be part of something bigger. One of the reasons I like poems is that they tend to be short. You can pocket one and take it away with you (as the boy does with the clay pipe in my poem ‘Debonair’). I’ve always been a collector of things—rocks and minerals, miniature ceramic pots, birds’ nests. The thrill for the collector is to try to find one of each specimen, to acquire the full complement. Of course this is a fantasy. Life isn’t a closed system: you can’t gather it all together like the pieces of a puzzle in a box. And yet the collection—the poetry collection—is the box. If you can find, or shape, enough small pieces together to make a convincing picture, you have a book. But your collection is never finished. It’s a life-long project.
This week's article is by Erica McAlpine, author of Small Pointed Things, which is published this month! Remember to use the code APRILBOOKS for 10% off and free UK P&P.
Please join us online at 7pm on Wednesday 7th May to celebrate the launch of Small Pointed Things! The reading will be hosted by Kate Wakeling. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along. Book your place here.
You can also join us at 5:30pm on Tuesday 6th May to launch Small Pointed Things at St Edmund Hall’s Old Dining Hall in Oxford! The event is free to attend and refreshments will be provided. Copies of the book will be available to purchse on the night. Everyone is welcome but please reserve a free ticket as places are limited. Book tickets here.