There’s a really good conversation going on in the comment section of my previous post on manuscript process, including the question of why 48 pages in the minimum marker of a full length collection.
In my portion of the talk in Willie Perdomo’s VONA class last Friday, I mostly focused on the building of Gravities of Center, how my first DIY chapbook came to be and then opened the way to the first book. I brought up that 48 page minimum requirement, my concern of whether I had enough poetry, quickly mentioned a couple of things about traditional book production and perfect bind as the reasons for the page minimum, and as I said these things, Willie nodded in agreement or acknowledgment.
Apart from myself, Paul S. Flores, Roger Bonair-Agard, Ruth Forman, and briefly Suheir Hammad, also spoke on that manuscript process. None of us questioned full-length minimum requirements, and neither did Willie. We all simply worked to meet this challenge of volume and substantial content, properly ordered, and finely edited by someone whose hardest criticism we trusted.
