Why Write Poems in Series?

I’d like to talk about the benefits (and problems) of writing poetry in series. I’ve talked to two other poets (Oliver de la Paz and Joannie Stangeland) about my struggle in trying to teach a lecture on this topic because of the lack of available reading material on the subject. If you know of any essays on writing poetry in series, will you point me to them? If you have any thoughts on the topic, please feel free to post them in the comments!

I write poems in series and I write “one-off” poems that have nothing to do with other poems. I usually get obsessed with an idea (say, female comic book superheroes or characters in fairy tales coming to dark ends, or fox-wives or Oak Ridge’s nuclear pollution or something) for a year and then I write poem after poem around that general idea. This has to do with my reading practices as well; the years that I wrote Becoming the Villainess, I was reading a lot of feminist criticism, Ovid, and Jungian theory about folk tales; while writing my current manuscript I’m reading a lot of non-fiction about the Manhattan Project. There are different speakers and different scenes in these poems, different tones and forms, but the subject stays generally the same. That’s not something I do on purpose; it just works out that way.

The reason I talk in my class about writing in series is because I think it helps students start thinking about larger projects: chapbooks, or full-length manuscripts, which generally are easier to shape if they have a controlling overarching theme or idea. It’s like building your final show for Project Runway; it really helps if the clothes in the show hold together in some way (the same kind of pleating, a Gothic sensibility) but aren’t exactly alike. If you get to the point where you, as a poet, want to put together a collection, and all you have are “one-offs” – a blue feathered jumpsuit, a crisp sailor outfit and a ruffled silk trench – then it’s harder to figure out the structure of the whole and harder to communicate to your audience what you are, as an artist, trying to say. (I watched Project Runway for the first time this summer, so forgive the clumsy analogies.)

But there are downsides to writing in series – what if the poems don’t stand alone, what if necessary information from one poem is missing in another or the interplay between poems is lost when poems are published independently?

Do you write poems in series? Why or why not?