How does a poem begin?
rob gave me two very difficult questions—What makes a good poem? and How does a poem begin?—and about five hundred words to answer them, so I’ve opted for a hybrid approach.
I’ve been thinking about how to be a better poet, or how to write better poems, how to put in effort without the poems feeling effortful. I started thinking about this question in earnest after receiving a kind rejection from editor/poet/polymath Jim Johnstone, who possesses the unique skill of giving a good “no.” My conflict-averse self cannot fathom being in his situation: a friend to so many poets, with space to publish maybe four or five collections per year, but Jim has certainly found a way to manage all the egos with grace and generosity.
When I sent Jim the manuscript of what would eventually become my collection As Is, not only did he offer to help me find another publisher for the book, as well as providing a blurb for the eventual jacket, but he also let me know that the poems had one further step to take. Praise is always nice, but honest (and accurate) criticism is much harder to come by. I could see what he meant, but how to get there? Where does a gooder poem begin?
Part of the answer lay in reading several books that mixed exploration of craft with a kind of literary criticism that tracks a poet’s development across their career—books like Canadian Primal by Mark Dickinson, Almost Islands by Stephen Collis, We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher and even Jim’s own collection Bait & Switch which includes a wonderful essay on editing Tolu Oloruntoba’s The Junta of Happenstance. In each of these books, their authors explore the nebulous process of artistic development. I’m not sure, even after reading these, that I could say exactly what it takes to make that next step, but there is a devotion to the work among many if not all of the poets covered in these books, a deep and seemingly unceasing consideration.
For me, in writing about my hometown of Hamilton, ON, my next step was letting history in, allowing the time scale of the poems to expand. Inspired by Dickinson’s exploration of Don McKay’s Long Sault and its relationship to local history, as well as Collis’s examination of Phyllis Webb’s search for a wider sense of time in her poems about the west coast, I began reading as much local history as I could get my hands on (Ah research, now there’s the ear’s coffin) and waiting impatiently until my poems began to take on a sedimentary quality, a sense of time that was composite.
I’m not sure I came to any strong conclusions, but it was affirming to know that many poets have gone this way before and have directed their attentions at this mysterious craft, given poetry the best parts of their thinking. Ultimately, it is up to each poet to decide for themselves where they are headed and to learn what they can, from those around and before them, about how they might get there (Traveler, there is no road; / you make your own path as you walk.) through some wild mix of intuition and openness and study and focus and freedom.
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, an essay on naming, birth, and grief was published by Palimpsest Press in 2023. His poetry collection, As Is, was published by ARP Books in 2024. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas. You can find him online at benrobinson.work.
