While reading Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing In Odessa, I have been thinking of the importance of the visual space in between poems. Kaminsky's book is divided into five sections, with broad title headings. And that's what the reader gets in the Table of Contents. Looking at the Table of Contents, it might seem that this book is composed almost solely of long poems. It is only when the readers go into the sections proper, does he/she realize that these broad sections are broken up into smaller poems, each with a separate title. One can read them as one long poem, or as smaller stand-alone poems. From the perspective of a reader, it provides him/her with some more breathing space. It allows him/her to stop after every shorter poem, process it before moving on to the next one.
In my manuscript, right now, I have at least five long poems. They are not titled separately (except for one). And even the one that is titled that way, I don't follow the one poem-a-page convention which Kaminsky does. When I was working on the manuscript, I thought, I don't necessarily need to go for that, since I am writing long poems. But on reading Kaminsky, I am thinking, maybe it is good to provide the readers with some more visual blank space. It makes it easier for them to process the individual poems, thus strengthening further the impact of the work I am trying to do. So, for the next round of revisions, I will try to use that one-poem-a-page convention, and see where it takes me.
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