Putting together a pamphlet - the last poem

By Kim Moore

This year I’m judging the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition, and featuring a series of posts here about putting a pamphlet together. The deadline is the 30th November, which is fast approaching so I thought it was time for another post! I hope these posts will be of use to anyone who is assembling a body of work - whether for this competition or another submission call.

My last post discussed the importance of the first poem in your pamphlet, how it can function as a doorway into your work and your way of thinking, how it can be a calling card for the way that you work with language.

In this post, I’d like to think about the last poem in your pamphlet, and the weight that this poem can carry. To do this, again I’m going to draw on my own pamphlet, as it’s a subject I can talk about with a relative amount of knowledge, but I’m also going to feature a few other poems from other pamphlets as well.

For those just joining me here on this Substack, my pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves won the 2011 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. When I won the pamphlet competition, I then had some time between winning and publication to work on the pamphlet with either Peter or Ann Sansom. I worked on my pamphlet predominantly with Ann, and we added some new poems in and also changed the order around.

In the original version, my last poem was what I thought was a fairly light-hearted poem called “Retirement”. The poem is in third person and is a series of observations about a poet, who has officially retired from poetry. As a twenty year old writer, I found it quite funny to think of this poem being the final poem in the pamphlet. Back then, I think I was still in that stage of thinking if I had just one publication, if I was lucky enough to get one pamphlet published, then I wouldn’t mind if I never published anything again. Little did I know!

Here is the poem.

RETIREMENT
KIM MOORE

The poet has cut his hair 
and bought a flat in the city. 

At night he talks to the sky 
but doesn't write it down. 

When he hears a pigeon call, 
he doesn't compare it to anything, 

even in his head. Each night
from the window all he sees 

are buildings.  He ignores 
how the silver in the roof tiles 

looks like stars, how the shadow 
of a cat appears big as a tiger

with the moon behind it. 
He's given his poems away, 

left them on bus seats, 
scattered the pages 

of his unfinished collection 
on the rails of the tube. 

Sometimes he imagines 
the footprints of the tube mice, 

sooty on his words, 
the swirl of pages, 

showing off 
in the backdraught of a train. 

Ann Sansom said that she loved the poem, but felt like it meant the pamphlet ended on a bit of a downer (I’m not sure if they were her actual words, but you get the general gist). When I wrote this poem, I couldn’t imagine ‘retiring’ from poetry. I’d not experienced writers block and I was writing all the time. I remember a sense of urgency around the act of writing - because I was fitting it in around a full time job teaching music. Every moment I got to write was precious - it was inconceivable to imagine a world when everything looked ordinary again, a world when I wouldn’t be writing.

It’s strange looking back now because at the same time as writing this poem, I was retiring from something - from trumpet playing. In my mid-twenties, I decided that performing semi-professionally was too painful because of my anxiety around it, a form of torture that I didn’t want to inflict on myself anymore so I decided to officially retire. It took me many years and a pandemic to write about that decision and the open wound of it, but perhaps this poem is a veiled nod to what I was refusing to look at, that sadness at ‘retiring’ from music. If you are interested in that story, I wrote a memoir/lyric essay called What the Trumpet Taught Me, which was published by Smith/Doorstop in 2023. If you’d like a signed copy, you can order one from my website.

Anyway, this poem was moved so that it was the third poem in from the final poem. In its place we put in a poem called “The Rabbit and the Moon”. Here is the poem:

THE RABBIT AND THE MOON
KIM MOORE

Let me tell you the story of a high, lonely place 
where sight and sound carry with the pylon 
that gives its shadow to the hill, and the farm 
many fields away, and the long straight road. 

A bird calls kehaar, kehaar to the moon
and trains are falling, falling into the night. 
The black rabbit waits outside the caravan 
and come morning, the booted feet of gulls 

will be telling us to leave, but if we stay, 
the dogs will lie like rugs at our feet. 
Somewhere, there are other rabbits, and a river
to sail away on. Somewhere, there's a boat. 

What does this do as the last poem in the book? Well first of all, as I talked about in ‘Putting together a pamphlet - the first poem’ it circles back round to the first poem in the pamphlet, which also contained a boat. In the first poem, it was a ‘blue boat waiting at the shore’. In this poem, the boat is ‘somewhere’. It’s out of sight, but I think it is definitely there, waiting.

This last poem is a direct address to the reader as well with the opening ‘Let me tell you’. I feel it’s a poem that addresses the reader directly - which is interesting to me now, as I went on to write about the relationship between the writer and the reader as part of my PhD research many years later.

I became really interested in Jonathan Culler’s ideas around ‘triangulated address’. He argues that most lyric poems speak to something or someone else other than the reader - whether that is a god, an animal or a muse. It’s much rarer to talk directly to the audience or reader. I experimented with direct address in All the Men I Never Married years later, particularly in All the Men I Never Married No.1 and All the Men I Never Married No. 7

Of course, by the end of the poem, the reader might realise and feel that the poem is not, in fact, addressed to them. It becomes clear that the speaker is addressing someone close to them, someone who is in a caravan with them, someone that they want to stay inside with, even though the last line promises that if they do leave, there will be a boat that will carry them away to safety. Turns out I was using Culler’s triangulated address all the time!

The poem also uses lots of images from Watership Down. When I was younger, I was completely obsessed with both the book and the rather disturbing animated film, which I used to watch every day on my return from school. I suppose this poem stakes a claim for the cultural references that I wanted to engage with that might be seen by some people to be ‘low art’ when compared to references to greek mythology or Shakespeare, or even biblical stories. Most of the images are from Watership Down, and are easily recognised if you know the book or the film, again, I think this says something about who I wanted to talk to when I was writing these poems. My people were the people who loved Watership Down.

I love this article in the Chicago Review of Books: “How Do Poets Choose a Collection’s Final Poem” by Sarah Blake. She interviews four poets and asks them about the last poem in their books, which seems like a useful and sensible thing to do, and perhaps one I should try in future!

One of the poets she interviews is Leah Huizar. She writes that “Closing a collection is a way of reopening it. I was once told that after reading a poetry collection one should return to its first and last poems to see how they speak to each other. To read this way is to venture that there is often a kind of dialogue between these poles. More specifically, the movement from the final poem back into the book’s first poem enacts a recursive transformation of meaning and perspective”.

This is really interesting to me when I reflect back on my first and last poems (see here for a post about opening poems, including a reflection on my first poem). To think of the first and last poem as two poles, and the poems in between as the dialogue. And of course when we consider a pamphlet, those two furthest poles, the first and last poem, are a lot closer together than they are in a full collection.

I’d not noticed before how both poems settle down to tell the reader a story. The first line of “Walney Channel” starts “There’s a doorway in the channel, made of thin black twisted wood” and the first line of “The Rabbit and the Moon”: “Let me tell you a story…”. In the first poem, there is an instructional tone, a kind of distance between the speaker and the reader. In the last poem, I feel as if the voice of the speaker still wants to tell a story, but they have come alongside whoever is listening. They are inviting them closer.

Sarah Blake writes that “The final poem has a large task - it has to make the book feel finished. It will, by its position, speak to every other poem in the book. It will inevitably turn the reader somewhere; the author decides where that will be.”

So, good luck with finding your last poems, if you are currently pulling together a pamphlet submission, or a collection submission. Again, I always think the best way of doing this is to take a handful of your favourite collections off the shelf and think about why those poets have chosen the poem they have as the last one in their collection. What is that poem doing? How is it in dialogue with the rest of the book? What is the relationship of the last ‘pole’ with the first pole - not just thematically, but in terms of register, form, approach?

If you would like to enter the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition, the deadline is approaching fast on the 30th November. Good luck with your submission!