I'm currently working on a poetry project and have been reading poetry books by individual authors. I normally read each poem as if it was supposed to stand alone and gave no real thought as to the order each poem came, or if there was any connection between each piece.
Now I'm reading more and giving more thought to my own work, I find myself questioning whether I should be giving any thought as to how each poem relates to the others, or if they should each sit individually.
I was once told by someone in the music industry (a while back) that the first major question facing music production on albums was what songs to include, and the second major question was which order they should come in.
How do you read poetry and short stories complied together, by the same author? Individually or as part of a whole book? Does it depend upon the poems and the author?
If you're an author of this ilk, how do you decide what content comes where?
There's no single rule here, Kay. Some poetry collections are for standalone poems, others are narrative, in which each poem forms a kind of chapter in a story.
It's entirely up to you how you lay out your collection, but if there is a theme - say you have one about dawn, one about sunlight, and another about the night, but you wrote them at different times and they weren't then related - you may want to consider putting them in the order in which each would be encountered in the day for symmetry.
Maybe your poems refer to love - gained, lost, regained, whatever: you could put them in the order in which they occurred in your life, though no-one else would know that, or you could go with the way they sound, as in music, where some notes naturally follow after others and some clash.
The thing is to go with your own gut and sense of what's comfortable. If you need the poems to be read in a particular order, say so at the beginning and explain why.
Lorraine