Delighted by the experience of reading the titles of the poems in Jordan's new manuscript (my favorites include "HOW TO GET STARTED, HOW TO KEEP GOING, HOW TO STOP," which strikes me as a kind of answer to Gaugin, "SPRING IN THIS UNDULY MOSHPIT COMPARISON CHART," and "THE EARTH IS SUSPICIOUS"), I thought I'd share my own. This is the TOC to what I sometimes think of as Selah's brother (sister?) manuscript, The Nature Theater of Oklahoma:
	A Threat of Courtiers
	Noonday Demon
	A Letter to the Body
	The Woods
	Britons Never Will Be Slaves
	The Treatment
	Stage Blood on the Mouths of the Eumenides
	Abramowitz
	Ingram Frizer	
	Here I Am in the Forest
	Un Chasseur de l’Hôtel des Étoiles Aveugles	
	A Forest, Children, the Darkling	
	The Bright Attenuated Image of Our Fame	
	Abramowitz and After	
	History of the Present Idea	
	A Jest Falls from the Speechless Caravan	
	Agave Agape	
	True Difficulty	
	Desire. Facsimile. Fate	
	L’Enfer Est d’Autres	
	Fog Said
	Private Life
	On Our Imperfect Knowledge of Void	
	Sycorax	
	Loose Birch	
	It Is Painted, Her Motion	
	A Fine Romance	
	The Language Works Extremely Well	
	The Kitchen of Francesca and Paolo	
	Lateland	
	No More Marriages	
	Fathomcant	
	Dissolved Soviet	
	History of Flight	
	North, Miss Teschmacher	
	A Pilgrim’s Progress	
	Ars Hollywood	
	Alternatives to Ohio	
	Landscape with Gettysburg Address	
	Candidacy	
	The Sweepers	
	The Glooms	
	The Nature Theater of Oklahoma	
	Caliban’s Orchestra	
One thing I sometimes wonder about is how and why some poets decide to provide only what I think of as section titles in their tables of contents. Michael Palmer usually does this, Norma Cole has done itit's a pretty "avanty" thing to do. In some cases it seems organic enough. My third manuscript, Fourier Series, has a TOC like that, because I want each section to be experienced as a single movement. These are not the quatres mouvements from Fourier's book of that title, but they do derive from my very literal attempt to overlay his theory of the passions onto the map of the Western U.S.:
	Four Corners
	The Five Senses
	The Affective Passions	
	The Mechanizing Passions	
	Manifest Destiny	
C'est tout. I suppose I've answered my own question: TOCs of this nature help to unify the sections of a book into something tighter, more chapterlike. Still I sometimes detect a whiff of snobbery around the practice, as if there were nothing more bourgeois than a simple list of individual poems with individual titles. Mais oui, c'est la guerre.
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