Ordering poems becomes a familiar act if you consider the lyric poem in its original form—the song. And if you were the kind of incessant list-maker Nick Hornby describes in his novel High Fidelity, the kind who also made mix tapes from your album collection. If you were the kind of geek my college boyfriend, Tim, was and—admittedly—the kind I was too.

Our love affair began with a trade of tapes, and from there things got competitive. When we were twenty and camping in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, we spent our hikes making up imaginary tapes. One of us would suggest a topic—songs with a Bo Diddley beat, revenge songs for ex-lovers—and we would alternate naming titles until somebody was stumped and lost. Once, when we spent a year apart, we sent tapes through the mail. Instead of thanking each other, we rated them on a one- to five-star scale. By the time we moved in together, making the tapes had become a speed game. We assembled them together, alternating songs. Before the other person's song ended, you had to cue up a new one that fit or face humiliation.

Our pride and pains were immature, but I now think of that serious play as a beginning: It taught me one way to think about a book of poems. We were relentlessly critical of each other's sensibilities. (As Hornby's character Rob Fleming says, "Oh, there are loads of rules.") And we cared about the game, about solving a problem within a form. We titled the finished tapes, rubber-cemented cover art we cut from ads into the plastic cases. Tim even had an imaginary label, P. Pineapple Productions, so called in honor of his unrequited lust for a girl in his dorm named Pam. And years later, I remembered the obsolete art of the mix tape when I sat on my living room floor, surrounded by every poem I'd written, to order my first book for what would turn out to be the last time. The old questions still applied: Can I be surprising and still make sense? Can I intrigue someone I respect?

I no longer own even one record, but I have compiled the best advice on poem order I've gleaned—from books, editors, other poets, and experience—to make you, Dear Reader, this mix tape. Though I can already tell you, Tim would not give it more than four stars.

When Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in 1967, according to Rock of Ages, Rolling Stone's history of rock and roll, it was the first time anyone had asserted that an album itself made a whole. Before that, bands put out collections of unrelated, randomly sequenced songs, not unlike the way poets once put out collections of unconnected lyrics and called them Poems. It's now hard to imagine that an album, or a book of poetry, might not be a cohesive entity. But the good news for the poet is that the songs on Sgt. Pepper's aren't much more related than those on earlier Beatles' collections. In some ways, the album is more eclectic.

What's changed is that, like any good piece of writing, Sgt. Pepper's enters into a contract with its audience. Its title and cover art announce that the Beatles are donning the persona of a psychedelic vaudeville group; what you are about to hear is its performance. The Fab Four's glitzy costumes and the icons crowded around them on the album jacket hint at the showbiz razzle-dazzle, the grab bag of musical styles they will momentarily reach inside.

The result? If you think of a work of art as a physical space, the Beatles have performed the trick of enlarging their space by claiming to narrow it. H. Emerson Blake, former editor in chief of Milkweed Editions, says a poet can perform similar sleight of hand: A title and any section titles or governing conceit probably work best if they expand, rather than limit, the reader's understanding of the book. And when titling your book, in addition to asking, "What do all these poems have to do with one another?" he says you might also ask, "Who is the author who puts all of these poems—these marmalade skies, tangerine trees, and the Albert Hall—here in one place?" In the Beatles' case, a psychedelic vaudeville group.

Of course, poems are not necessarily autobiography—but if you were to consider the governing persona who speaks in your poems, how would you sum him or her up? Take a look at any of the following to see how poets can draw their versions of this character loosely: The Brass Girl Brouhaha by Adrian Blevins (Ausable Press, 2003), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A by A. Van Jordan (Norton, 2004), and She Didn't Mean to Do It by Daisy Fried (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

A poem is an accumulation of different kinds of repetition. When you repeat a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, you get meter; when you repeat sounds you get alliteration, rhyme, assonance; when you repeat images, you get a motif; when you repeat an idea, a theme. A poem's natural compression heightens these sensations of repetition. Something like this can happen over the length of a book as well, as various kinds of repetitions take place over a series of poems.

You can create cohesion in a manuscript by linking poems not just according to the obvious issues of theme, chronology, or similar forms, but also by repeated images, colors, and shapes. You can juxtapose: Follow a long poem with a short one; let a poem argue with whatever the last one asserted was true. Break up a group of similar poems to make the reading experience less symmetrical—intersperse, say, narrative poems from the point of view of a specific character with lyrics about objects that appear tangentially in the narratives. In this way the relationship among poems becomes more subtle and complex, more unexpected and, therefore, more exciting.

The first poem in a collection provides an entry point for the reader, an invitation into the work. The selection in the number two slot is just as crucial in that it shows your reader (or listener) how you make patterns. "Poets sometimes put poems that are too much alike too close together. I like those chimes to have more of an echo," says Jeffrey Shotts, poetry editor of Graywolf Press. This might be especially important at the beginning of a book; you don't want the contract you've made with the reader to be too tightly written. By putting some space between the most obvious matches, a poet can create even more space for herself to move around in.

The first three poems in Tony Hoagland's Donkey Gospel (Graywolf, 1998) are "Jet," "Mistaken Identity," and "Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet." You'd think that "Jet," a persona poem from the point of view of a plane, would be followed by "Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet." But if Hoagland had done this, the reader might happily shout, "Oh, I get it! Poems about planes!" and, perhaps, put the book down.

Instead, Hoagland follows "Jet," which ends, "We gaze into the night / as if remembering the bright unbroken planet / we once came from," with a poem that begins, "I thought I saw my mother / in the lesbian bar," and the reader must work harder to forge connections. They exist: When the male speaker of the second poem says that watching the women dance together makes him feel as speechless "as the first horse to meet the first / horseless carriage on a cobbled street," we remember the jets feeling nostalgic and out of place in the previous poem.

"Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet" is far away enough from "Jet" that it creates resonance in the way slant rhymes do at the ends of the second and fourth lines of a Dickinson ballad stanza. They aren't so close together that they risk becoming singsong, but the second isn't so far down the road that you've forgotten about the first.

Sections are often the building blocks of good books, and Pattiann Rogers was the first poet to teach me a way to make them. Each section of a book needs its own theme, she said, but obvious ones are out—"love poems" can't be a single group. Within sections, something from the last poem has to link to the next one: an apple, tulips, yellow flowers, flying. When I couldn't get the hang of it, Pattiann had me go through my poems and write a list of the images and themes I noticed in the lower right-hand corner of each manuscript page.

I soon realized that even though I had most of my poems memorized, I had no idea of how each one related to the others. And because I couldn't keep my mind on all my poems at once, I had to break them down into clusters of three poems each. Then I started putting those clusters together, rearranging the order of my mini-groups each time.

Pattiann was patient. For four months I visited her every other week, sitting in her living room, watching her turn the pages of my manuscript. Each time she turned a page, she looked up, and I had to justify why that poem followed the previous one and how it had earned its place in that particular section. If she was satisfied with my answers, she nodded and continued. If she turned the page sideways, I knew I was coming back in two weeks.

Tim and I always kept a few short songs on hand in case we were stuck with an odd last minute or two of tape on a side. Tim favored the Pixies' "Brick Is Red." It wasn't his favorite song, but it was a useful one.

Sometimes poems that would not stand alone in a magazine can work in a book. Search your archive for poems that initially seemed too short, playful, or slight to send out on their own. They might provide needed texture and contrast, or provide links between sets of longer, more challenging poems.

You are allowed—even encouraged—to have obsessions. While you don't want poems that are "too much alike too close together," you also don't want a book that is so scattershot it has no focus—a flaw first books are more prone to than later ones, because beginning poets are often still trying on styles and finding out what their obsessions are.

Poet Nan Cohen, author of Rope Bridge (Cherry Grove, 2005), has read thousands of applications for fellowships to the Napa Valley Writers' Conference and other programs, and says that beginning poets are often too embarrassed by their own strangeness. To prove range, they hold back and include only two poems about their mothers in their writing samples, when seven poems talking together about her might make them more compelling, and give their samples depth. Order can make a poet's obsessions more interesting.

Theodore Roethke insisted he had set his greenhouse poems in The Lost Son and Other Poems in no particular order, but critical pieces were still written about whether the sequence is structured to mimic the feel of manic depression, or to trace a boy's coming-of-age. Poetry readers read white space. Their imaginations want to fill in the shapes you provide.

The white space between one poem and the next, like the white space between two lines or stanzas, can function as a form of innuendo. Think of the way a reader can watch power and mood shift in the white spaces between Marilyn Nelson's Homeplace poems because of the way she ordered them in her volume of selected poems, The Fields of Praise (Louisiana State University Press, 1997). The poem "Balance" tells us Marse Tyler watches his slave Diverne "like a coonhound watch a tree," that Diverne parades by and "hone(s) his body's yearning to a keen, / sharp point. And on that point she balanced life. / That hoe Diverne think she Marse Tyler's wife." The next poem, a sonnet called "Chosen," abruptly shifts mood; here we learn that "Diverne wanted to die, that August night / his face hung over hers, a sweating moon," and we find that Diverne's rape by her master has given her a child, Pomp. The title of the next poem, "Daughters, 1900," tells us that at least forty years have passed. It begins "Five daughters, in the slant light on the porch, / are bickering," and we learn that they are educated and want to become teachers. It isn't until their father lowers his newspaper near the end of the poem that we realize he is Pomp, the boy begotten years earlier. The poems are not merely arranged chronologically. Their order, highlighting shifts in tone, point of view, and mood, deepens our reading of each poem—what is calm becomes bittersweet; raw terror leads to life.

Finding the right order is more art than science. Brian Teare said he knew he was done ordering his first book, the Brittingham Prize winner The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), when he felt that if he "pulled out so much as one poem, the entire structure would come crashing down."

"It felt done, in a way that it hadn't before," Beth Ann Fennelly says of the end of her struggle to find the right order for her first book, Open House (Zoo Press, 2002). She had been arranging a group of early poems in a wide variety of styles, tones, and subject matter when she began to think of the book as a house, with various sections like rooms. "The experience was like my first fishing trip," she says. "I kept asking, ‘Is that a bite? Is that a bite?' when it was only me moving the rod. When a fish finally hit, I didn't need to ask: I knew."

After all this, the average reader of poems probably does not notice a book's structure. I almost never read a book of poems in order. Yet I don't believe for a minute that structure is not important. Order implies a coherence, a polish, a form of regard for the reader—or for the contest judge.

We value the book of poetry, in part, because it is as thoughtfully constructed as a Japanese bento box. Its title is carefully chosen; its cover enhances a theme with design and color; its sections develop a theme, sometimes with titles; the order within its sections makes individual poems sparkle. Its whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's a poem made from all of your poems.

Whether or not a reader immediately notices a book's structure, she notices its effects. The right order does for poems what our mothers said the right dress would do for us—flatters, minimizes flaws.

When Tim died in his midtwenties, I did what he once told me every man fears a woman in pain might do. I sold his record collection. The copy of Sticky Fingers with the working zipper? The Led Zeppelin album with the brown paper cover? All of them. All of them.

And why only four stars? From fifteen years away I hear it: "The reader should be able to record the songs that begin each section in order and have a tape that sounds good—the form should be functional." Imagined point well taken. But as Tim also thought art rock sacrificed craft for concept, let this coda serve as a warning: Don't get wrapped up in a book's concept at the expense of its poems. We've all seen books so focused on a theme that their individual poems are as bloodless and forgettable as the songs on an Emerson, Lake & Palmer album. For what it's worth, the Rolling Stone album guide calls Sgt. Pepper's not a triumph of songwriting, but of production.

Katrina Vandenberg is the author of Atlas: Poems, published by Milkweed Editions in 2004.

Click here [3] to download a playlist of songs from this essay. (The iTunes [4] player is required for this download.)