Door Stop, Full Stop
On assembling a proper farewell to something that's mattered to me a great deal.
Poems run at a tangent to the great beast of life. They usually glance off its hide. But their odd trajectories also sometimes allow them to pierce it.
That trajectory also makes poems easy to forget, like dreams. There’s little in the everyday world to remind a person of most dreams or most poems. They get lost. It doesn’t take too strong of a breeze to blow them away.
Paper weights
For most of my writing life, I’ve lived in fear of my poems blowing away. When I was sixteen, I gathered up my poems from that year and bound them with the thick paper from grocery-store bags, with duct tape and staples for a binding.
During the summer before I got married in 2010, I did something like this again, going back through uncollected poems and getting them into a single binding. I added to that collection of poems, called Heaven Unbuilt, in 2012.
Somewhere during 2020, I started to suspect that I’d written my last poem (see December’s “Poet Retires” and “Take This Imperishable Literary Form and Shove It”). And in 2024, I realized I was well and truly retired. That’s when I started to get the idea to put all the poems into a once-and-for-all type collection.
The cutting-room floor
In 2002, I was living alone in a drafty apartment under the Williamsburg Bridge and receiving a steady stream of SASEs with rejection slips and tri-folded poems inside from literary journals far and wide. That’s when I became a much more ferocious editor of my work, methodically doing 10-12 drafts of each poem.
Of the poems in the final form of Heaven Unbuilt, there are a few from when I was as young as twenty. But I cut out a lot of the early stuff, along with a bunch of the songs I wrote when I was in a band from 2005 to 2007. Otherwise, I took a light hand editing the collection, preferring to err on the side of “let the kid say his piece.”
After all, I’m never going to see things that way again, or think that way again. And at the time, I made my older self promise he wouldn’t wuss out and back down.
Greedo never got a shot off
Going back over your old work is fraught with dangers. If you don’t think so, look at George Lucas - he went back to fix the original Star Wars movies and made a generation of fans into enemies.
The Greedo scene in the first Star Wars is where the most vicious criticisms found purchase, and rightly so. This is because the revision of that scene is a smug slander against youth itself, perpetrated by corrupt and self-serving old age.
In the original, Greedo and Han Solo are having a spicy, hostile conversation. Greedo has a gun. But it’s not clear what he’ll do or how he’ll do it. Han is willing to be wrong one way rather than the other, though, and shoots Greedo under the table. In the new version, Greedo shoots first, making Han’s shot a matter of completely justifiable self-defense. Han had no choice.
But young people liked the original Greedo scene precisely because it spoke to the condition of youth, in which you almost never know what’s going to happen, and there are always a dizzying number of choices.
Only old people - living in a when-all’s-said-and-done twilight fantasy land - would dare say there’s only one way that things could have happened. Decades of self-justification can lead someone to take comfort in the notion that, really, they never had any choice but to do the maybe terrible thing they did.
I bring up Greedo and George Lucas as an example of the corruption that’s always ready to infect everything when you try to “improve” your earlier work.
So the wind won’t blow it all away
Gathering up two decades of work comes with a full complement of spiritual, personal, aesthetic and practical hazards.
The practical ones start with finding all the poems. This took some doing. Then came decisions around choosing a printer, and seeing what options they could provide in terms of page size, royalty payments, distribution and book length. That last one was important. Heaven Unbuilt clocks in at about 975 pages.
From there I had to arrive at more aesthetic considerations like page size, typeface, layout and conventions around titles and things like what do you do if a line is longer than the margins of a page. When making a book, each bit of minutia well-considered will usually make it better. There are a hundred little things to get wrong, like starting a section on a right-hand page, and they’re jarring for the reader.
With a 975-page book of poems that has a 30-page table of contents, hiring a serious interior designer didn’t only save the book, but also my sanity.
(Photo credit: Miriam Dodds, 2025)
Urgency
Going through those poems, what came back at me was the incredible urgency I felt at the time. This urgency started with getting the words down on paper, in reporter’s notebooks I carried everywhere in my back pocket. But then urgency was just as strong when it came to editing and publishing the work.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I went to ground zero to try and help out. But on the way downtown, I stopped at a little copy shop on Lexington Avenue to have a stack of poems copied and bound with a comb binding and clear-plastic cover, in case something happened to me.
In 2017, I was finalizing my collection Spokes of an Uneven Wheel for a small publisher. I was doing some work on the book during down time at the office, in a conference room, when word raced around the office that they were doing layoffs. I chased down my supervisor to find out if I was getting the axe, so I could get back to work on the book as soon as possible, either in a conference room or at home.
In the weeks before the Covid lockdowns in 2020, I’d done a Goodreads giveaway of that same book. The giveaway ended at the beginning of April - a time of high panic, of wearing a mask and gloves when you left the house, of wiping down your groceries when you got home. In the middle of all that, I remember passing fifty packages through the post-office service window. “What’s in them?” the clerk asked. “Books,” I said. “Same book in each one?” he asked. “Yep,” I said. “Is it a good book?” he asked. “Yep,” I said. “It better be.”
Does it matter?
Possibly. But not as a money-maker. The book is huge and expensive and full only of poems. Most people I can think of who’d buy it I already sent it to as a gift. This final edition of Heaven Unbuilt, for me, is a last thing to do to call the retirement complete. These essays are another.
A poem is deeply considered but almost never seen. It’s the opposite of the world where we live in, where so much that jams up our attention is so poorly considered. A good poem supports some unseen thing.
The only sales pitch
for Heaven Unbuilt is that it’s the last book of my poetry you’ll ever have to buy. It’s punctation. It’s a period. It’ll come out in May.
Retired poet implies direction and momentum, though the exact trajectory remains to be seen. You may sense a continued sympathy for the liberties and demands of poetry in these essays. What remains possible if you don’t call it poetry? To find out, I have to remove myself from that camp completely.
Poets who still call yourselves such, the field is yours. Everyone else, expect no warning for what comes next.
Selected bibliography
A great interior designer for a book
Take This Imperishable Literary Form and Shove It
Heaven Unbuilt, the definitive 2025 retirement edition of the collected poems of Colin Dodds
Note
The final edition of Heaven Unbuilt won’t come out until May. But subscribers of No Homework can get an early edition. Just ask.