Creating a Collection?

A couple of days before 2024 rolled over into 2025, I got one of my many lovingly-purchased-or-gifted journals and finally started filling some of its blank pages. (All my other, many, unused journals are jealous now, I’m sure.) I started listing out some of my writing goals for the new year, and many of them included Vocal.

One of the main projects I want to focus on this year is creating a poetry collection to be posted on Vocal. I have thoroughly enjoyed posting poetry here, and I have read works by some other Creators who would link more poems in their collections at the bottom of their pieces. It’s really cool and encouraging to see others writing with purpose and connecting their poetry pieces. While I have thought about writing collections of poetry before, I’ve never actually gotten into a project.

However, I find myself really excited to start working on this collection. The working title for it is An Alphabet for Nostalgia. Within this title are the two main constraints for the project: nostalgia for the overarching topic and the alphabet to place the poems alongside each other.

The collection will contain twenty-six poems. The first poem’s title will start with A (“Anaphora” if my plans stay the same), the second with B, and so on. I considered having the titles out of the regular alphabetical sequence, but right now I like the idea of that quality of the collection being fairly set in stone. I would write that I might shuffle the order around later, but that is not really in my plan.

And I’m definitely intending to do a lot of planning. In fact, I am still very deep in the planning phases, which is a little different than I am used to. I created plot outlines when I was in my MFA program for novels I attempted to write, but I don’t think I’ve ever mapped out how poems will relate to each other when compiled together. For this project in particular, I want to have a good idea of how each poem will approach aspects of nostalgia before fully diving into them, because I want this topic to come across as nuanced rather than repetitive.

Nostalgia is something I visit often in my pieces, particularly in poetry. It’s a concept I think about and fall into a great deal, especially over the last couple of years. I was a nostalgic person even in college, but losing my grandmother in 2023 and my upcoming wedding have made me look at the past and the future differently. My grandmother’s presence in my life for so long was something I took for granted, and her absence has been a huge, sad change. And this year, I’m heading for a huge, happy change by getting married. The prospect of change itself, though, puts me in nostalgic moods which I hope to channel into this project.

But I worry that if I don’t put the time into really narrowing down all my approaches, I will only change how I present the subject without looking at it from a new or new-to-me lens in relation to the poems in this collection and my other works. I have already written several pieces incorporating memories and nostalgia, but I am having a lot of fun trying to come up with more ideas!

For example, I want to incorporate some more formal poetry into this project since I tend to just write free verse. Tackling different forms might help me look at nostalgia from a different light through their individual constraints while also letting me write about a topic very much on my mind. Because I am placing an emphasis on the alphabet, I have to include an abecedarian poem, right? I think so! Haha, I do enjoy writing them, but is that too on-the-nose? Does it matter if I’m pleased with it? We’ll see.

Another form I want to include is the golden shovel. This type of poetry is probably my favorite to write besides free verse. You choose a line from another poem or piece of writing and incorporate it so that you can read that line vertically at the end of the each of your poem’s lines. Check out the Writer’s Digest article “Golden Shovel: Poetic Form” by Robert Lee Brewer to learn more about this form and its origins and see if it might be added to your repertoire of formal poetry. I’m thinking about using Robert Frost’s line of “[t]he woods are lovely, dark and deep” from “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It feels fitting for something nostalgic, possibly being turned into an almost can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees situation.

I also thought about including a villanelle or a sestina in the collection since both of these forms have a structure full of repetition and recall. But will those have too much repetition if I go forward to make “Anaphora”—a poem where I want to use that same rhetorical device to highlight how nostalgia, for me at least, occurs over and over—a piece in the collection as well?

I suppose I’ll just have to play around to find out! At the moment, I intend “Anaphora” to be the first piece in the collection, of course. This poem will have an autobiographical character. However, not all the pieces will have this element. As I’ve gotten older, I have found myself writing much more personal poetry whereas college-Hannah shied away from this and wrote poetry with lots of fictional, almost narrative progressions. This collection will have both. I don’t know yet if it will be almost equal or more personal or more narrative.

Becuase I feel like so many aspects of An Alphabet for Nostalgia need to be decided on before drafting the actual content of the poems, I intend to take the rest of January to get my gameplan settled. Then, I will publish the twenty-six poems throughout the rest of 2025. A tentative posting schedule is as follows:

• February: A, B
• March: C, D, E
• April: F, G
• May: H, I, J
• June: K, L
• July: M, N, O
• August: P, Q
• September: R, S, T
• October: U, V
• November: W, X, Y
• December: Z

We’ll see if I can actually make this schedule work, haha! I’m really hoping I can. I feel a bit differently about this project than I have about others. Oftentimes I’m fine with setting a goal but not reaching it. Or, not fine but also not that bothered.

I want to create this collection. I want to finish it.

And I’m itching to try!