Jennifer May Newhook : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

I do not know how a poem begins, only that it does . . .and if I’m very lucky, in my own work, at some point I recognize this. Some poems write themselves almost in absentia in the notes app on my phone, where I keep a miscellanea of odd words, overheard conversations, fleeting thoughts, and fragmented images, that for me, in whatever moment, I found—and continue to find—striking. Intuition, my inner assessor, thematically roughly groups these fragments, and often, it turns out, they (or I) are trying to say something. A good poetry workshop also for me will often very quickly produce the guts of a poem.

Some of my poems are troublesome, born from a complexity that is unknowable—to me at least—but insists, insists that it be reckoned with. These are the most difficult poems to wrestle with. The ones where every word feels clunky, every line break ill placed. Half finished, they languish in digital folders and on scraps of paper. Forgotten, they ferment. Re-found . . . perhaps I’ll add another word or two (usually ill advised). Perhaps I’ll erase a phrase (usually to the good). Poems like this take months, even years, to evolve into something I consider “finished.” I usually have a couple of these percolating in the background at any given time—I do like to honour the slow-time aspects of creation, because creativity is a completely different animal than productivity!

The most fun poems for me of course are those where inspiration strikes suddenly, when the fingers and pen can move barely fast enough to capture the words. These usually require little editing, or at least I find it best to not mess with these ones too much—a single misplaced move, and a fragile ecosystem of words can irretrievably collapse. There is multiplicity to consider, always. This word may not be perfect, but is it doing the good work of holding the other ones up? That word may disrupt the cadence . . . but does it lead you towards another one more compelling?

Perhaps what makes a good poem to read is not the same thing that makes a poem good to write. For me, good poems are imperfect—when crafted too meticulously, they tend to glide across my eyes and slide too quickly across my brain. I can appreciate them, but they do not settle in my marrow. They do not pierce to the quick. I like poems with surprises, jagged edges, off rhythms and rhymes. A thought that lands just ahead or behind the beat. An image imperfectly captured but arresting. An idea or emotion that rises to the surface but does not breach.

For me, mystery is an important thing to preserve—the unknowable-ness of things—which is perhaps why I am drawn irresistibly towards poetry, even when it is imperfect or challenging to engage with. In our increasingly digital lives, I sense something happening; I think of it as The Great Flattening. Images are saturated, bright lights shine everywhere, flaws exist only to be repaired or erased, and words are recycled by machines until they lose the meaning that made them words in the first place. In this brightly lit, saturated, compressed world, stumbling doggedly over distance towards some uneven, hidden thing for a fleeting moment that might either shine or slip through our fingers, now seems more necessary than ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jennifer May Newhook’s first full-length poetry collection, Last Hours, was released in 2024 by Riddle Fence Press, and she is currently working on the last, last draft of her first novel The Gulch, some flash fiction, new poems, and a collection of short stories. She has new work coming in the summer issue of The Dalhousie Review.

Carrie Hunter : Four poems

 

 

 

"I'm Waiting for the Ecology of District 6 to Right Itself"
 

Dreamed that there were regular housewarming parties at someone else’s house,
always the same person’s house who was not moving. 

It takes us longer to do everything, and we don't make any money.

Someone always has their leaf blower going.

Derek in my dream, standing on the bed in workboots,
which would horrify him to do in reality. 

The shadows of light, geometric, hard to look at.
I used to memorize it every day. 

"It would take thousands of bees to make enough waste to look like rain. Why would so many bees be in such specific locations, and why would they be pooping at the same time?" – On the Yellow Rain phenomenon/probable chemical warfare in South Asia

Celebrating function words.
"We are draining humanity’s lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption." 

“Don't seek the truth.
Stop cherishing opinions.” 

Two levels in my dream, but like levels in school
as well as a first and second level with stairs. 

“How do you save a house?” – Angel Dominguez

My ephemera archives.

Pre-earthquake weather earthquake weather.

The Buddenbrooks effect.

“Conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty.” – Brian Eno

Alice Babette.

"The paper is a psychic capacitor." – The Booksellers

 

"Snow from When the Earth Was Healthier"

Confusing Cruel Optimism and Cruel Fiction.

Most of our relationship has just been me admiring his t-shirts.

Making lists of lists I’m going to make.

"These might seem like minor footnotes, but for a band whose leader conceived his work with a monomaniacal focus, they represented a proud embrace of directionlessness."

Remembering today that there is a word in the Bhagavad Gita
that is a cognate with samasthiti, meaning those who stayed behind
while the others went to war. 

I am in the market for phrases.

Not everything can be fixed.

"A so-called private military company (PMC) Wagner, also known as ‘the Musicians’ and alleged to consist of 25,000 convicts-turned-soldiers, marched on Moscow."  "In Kyiv, Ukraine, popcorn and champagne sold out." – Zarina Zabrisky

The yoga aisle empty during lockdown.

"Sometimes spangled and ramshackle."

[Glazer] doesn’t “generally use very long shots, but he does use every other element of the currently ascendant rhetoric of the art film — distance, disidentification, naturalistic lighting, and bans on the closeup and on almost all camera movement (the most the camera moves is for sober trucking shots)."

The difference between belonging and not belonging can be subtle.

“Are you from the priory?”

Dots on a subway map.

I wake up out of the dream and see a face and a camera, and I jump,
but then realize it was part of the dream. 

One day, one day will be every day.

"It's a Christlike vision to have a fundamentalist Islamic state."

 

 

"I Don’t Look Forward to the Weekend at All”

"They burned everything and took everything. We did not bring anything with us. We have only God and our clothes." –Asiya (of Sudan) (Last name redacted) 

The virus you keep to yourself.

It was in my apartment I live in now,
but because it was a dream, it was very different looking. 

“Radical passivity.” – Jack Halberstam 

Sometimes I’m just shy about conversations.

“Old maid mermaid.” – Alice B. Toklas

All the daughters of everyone I went to elementary school with are always in pointe shoes.

"Marx became a materialist in 1841." – Schaff via Engels

“This wasn’t an analog rebellion.” – Damon Krukowski

One of those biographies that is just disputing what other biographies have said.

"Tosca" or "Turandot."

“I was too poor to buy a horse skull for the festival
but where there's cardboard & paper mache there is a way.” 

Filming a film is the beginning of the film.

Hive mind questions for the purpose of marketing/engagement baiting.

Nightmare about ICE and they all have ice picks.

Placation is compromised.

“Habitation for Hejinian involves a particular understanding
 of the process of indexing.” – Charles Altieri

A blue heart from a blue bag.

“Books organized around the border between 
timeless concepts and contingent examples.” – Lytle Shaw 

My choice went that way.

 

The Four Types of Cyclones
 

Epistolary book review. 

My students tell me widows with children in Saudi Arabia get free housing.

“Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato… retained enough lucidity to critique the musician [music was played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl] for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests.” – Lorenzo Tondo

Medical cruise.

I forgot about that jacket. I forgot about that memory, that bully.

Typewritten notecards.

“Intimacy isn't a choice.” – Violet Spurlock

The famous rattlesnake sound.

Thinking thoughts that are not quite words, but a sequence of events.

Just a backdrop to a nostalgia. 

Andy Warhol and Gertrude Stein, paralleled doubles.

Famous for their image slightly more than their works.

The unintelligibility of difference.

“Disc golf obstacle.”

“The dynamic of our happening to notice things, our coming into coexistence momentarily with them, but stopping short of the need to possess, categorize or contain them.” – Emily Critchley 

Aggressive breakfast energy.

Balloons as refuse.

Overheard: "Do you think that dog looks like Neapolitan ice cream?"

I am probably implicated in my very own critique.

The end result of a life lived having never learned how to cope and adapt.

 

 

 

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was in the Black Radish Books publishing collective, and edited the chapbook press, ypolita press. Her most recent full-length collection of poems is The Flow of the Poem's Display of Itself (Roof Books, 2025). She also has books out with Nightboat and Black Radish Books. Her latest chapbook Eva (not Eve) came out with Antiphony in early 2026. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.

Process Note #75 : Mai-Linh Hong

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Mai-Linh Hong are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

Process Note by Mai-Linh Hong

I was fortunate to go on my first artist residency—two magical weeks at the Vermont Studio Center—in early 2025. The timing was perfect, as I was revising my first collection, Continental Drift, to begin submitting it to presses. At the end of my first week, I did, in fact, submit it to the press that would later publish it.

In my cohort were twenty visual artists and eight writers, a ratio I found wonderfully generative. For me, visual practices are key, particularly during revision, and at this residency they were always on my mind. For example, writers at VSC were encouraged to put their manuscripts up on a wall and were provided with blue painters’ tape for this purpose. On my first day working in my studio, I grabbed a roll and set to work.

 

 

 

 

 

Once all the poems were up on a wall, I stepped back and saw the collection in a way I hadn’t before. At a distance, words were a blur, but the shapes they made came into focus. I perceived rhythms of line, density, dispersal, and white space across the collection. These had been impossible to see while scrolling on a computer screen (yes, I mostly compose on my laptop).

There were patterns and surprises. There was movement, and it was choreographed. I guess I had known this on some level, since I had choreographed it. But still, I was surprised to see it.

The question I got most from other residents who popped by my studio—and that I sometimes get from readers, now that the book is out—is some version of “How do you decide what visual form a poem will take?”

Truthfully, I experience poetry writing as a largely intuitive process. For many poems, visual-spatial form happens during revision. Poems vary greatly in how much revision they go through and how much they change. I’m not sure I can explain it, except to say:

The poem tells me how it wants to live on the page

and I try my best to listen.

*

In my Introduction to Poetry class, I teach students:

In written English, the line is the basic horizontal unit of a poem and is read left to write. The stanza is the basic vertical unit, composed of one or more lines, read top to bottom.

A poetic line can be any length, though it is limited by page width. (Well, in theory, I suppose you could digitally write a line that goes on longer, perhaps even forever—)

However, every poem must have at least one stanza, made up of at least one line. (Wait—must it? And who’s counting?)

It is week one, and my lesson is breaking down.

Actually, I want my students to think of a poem as an omnidirectional object. Sometimes, it takes them/me a few conceptual steps to get there.

I admit that two vectors—horizontal and vertical—are mostly adequate for reading most poems. But a poem has the potential to mean in ways other than left-to-right and returning to the left margin to begin each new line. Readers can do more than read one word or line or stanza at a time in a given order. Poems can use space, and order, in unexpected ways.

*

My six-part, speculative visual poem “Field Notes From Aliens Who Float” (first published in Hayden’s Ferry Review and available here) comes about halfway through Continental Drift. It is the collection’s centerpiece, thematically and formally.

I am a scholar of critical refugee studies. In line with much work in my field, I view refugees as a source of knowledge and creativity, and migration as a space of extraordinary insight. This poem expresses some lines of thought (so to speak) I haven’t yet been able to express with conventional academic writing.

I call the poem “speculative” because it is not that concerned with the “real” past, present, or future; rather, it asks what if. What if refugees wrote field notes, like scientists do, from their journey, charting the emergence of refugee knowledge? What if refugees collected, drew, measured, wondered, conjectured, named, risked, imagined, concluded—they do, all the time, of course—and all that was captured here?

Here is the poem on my wall in Vermont, close to its final form:

 

The poem looked very different early on. Here it is six months earlier, in four numbered sections across three pages:

 

Formally, two main shifts happened during revision. First, the sections became more independent and I dropped the numbering, leaving each section free-floating on its own page. Second, each section untethered from the left and top margins, allowing it to coalesce into a distinct visual shape. Think of how a water spill will reshape itself into droplets, each distinct from the other, given a bit of time.

Viewed together, the sections remind me of specimens saved by biologists or botanists in the field, perhaps seaweed, as suggested in the fourth section, which catalogs several species of seaweed. However, it is more the acts of observation and cataloging to which I allude with form, not specific species. We don’t go to poetry to identify species; we go to see what is meant by naming.

We might call this concrete poetry, poetry that forms a visual shape related to the topic of the poem. But the relationship between each shape and the section’s meaning is indirect and ambiguous. I want my poems to have space for ambiguity; perhaps that is why they move.

*

Poems can run, rest, wander, hesitate, creep, separate, splatter, undulate, come home. Like a painting, every poem maps the page, tells eyes where to go. Visual form hints whether a poem’s meaning universe is chaotic or rule-bound and which emotions predominate, even before you apprehend any words. It tells the reader how to treat time and space by directing where to begin, how quickly to read, where to pause, how to resume.

Poems ask you to hold multiple versions in your mind at once. This is why rereading is so important.

Personally, I think poetry is more fun than prose because of the frequency with which poets defy language and reading conventions. Students, for the most part, don’t love this about the genre—at least, at first. They want lines to be linear, like time.

I have news for them about time, too.

 

 

 

Mai-Linh Hong [photo credit: Indigo Rain Photography] is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press in July 2026. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Waxwing, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Wildness, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. She also publishes scholarly essays on Asian American and refugee literature. A lifelong crafter, she is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). She is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, Merced.

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com