Turning a Manuscript Into a Book: How to Assemble a Collection of Poems with David McLoghlin

Course Summary

While there is much focus in the poetry world on attending workshops to craft and finish our poems with the help of colleagues, we can be at sea when it comes to assembling a first book, or collection. Whether you are an experimentalist or more traditional, where poems are placed in relation to each other can make all the difference in putting together a coherent collection, or book. This course will mix poetic craft, via examples of how other poets have made their books, with macro-level creative writing workshop. This will give you both theory and practice in terms of how as to shape the arc of your collection.

Course Outline

Books of poetry usually fall into two types: high-concept “projects” or books where the poems centre around a particular subject—US poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau is a good example—or collections where the organising principles are the poet’s own recurring obsessions and themes.

We will look at how to select and winnow, how to assemble an arc, whether or not to use sections and section titles, or sequences, and how poems might speak to or comment on one another within a book, depending on their position. Over eight weeks we will look at a wide variety of methods as to placement of poems, and to edit student manuscripts on a macro level.

Course Outcomes

Students will come away with practical take aways as to the various methods of assembling a collection of poems. They will learn:

• how to winnow poems that duplicate one another thematically, or veer too far from the through-line.
• how to vary poems in terms of form and length
• and how to read their manuscript for what is missing, for the poem, or poems, that might be written to consciously fill the gaps in the overarching narrative.

David McLoghlin’s third collection, Crash Centre (Salmon Poetry, 2024) was shortlisted for the 2025 Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers Week. He was awarded a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in 2023, and was selected as one of two poets to represent Ireland on the Versopolis EU poetry network. He has taught creative writing widely (both memoir and poetry, online and in person) in the community and in university settings, and offers writing advice on memoir and poetry manuscripts.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.