How does a poem begin?
I have taken up cross-stitching which has to begin with an x somewhere on the canvas. When I was first learning it was recommended that I keep the canvas tight, stretched across a hoop, but I prefer just to hold the swath of canvas taut between the fingers and thumb of my left hand, holding tension intuitively, while my right hand threads the needle over and over. I have finished projects that felt right to my body as I was stitching, firm enough, that have rippled in the end. I think this is due to the knots I tie on the underside of the canvas when the threads grow short and need to be sealed so they don’t pull up, loosen, and come undone. Sometimes I pull too hard. When I finish the project and press it under the frames that preserves it, the raw straw-coloured material creases against the glass. A poem begins.
It is easy enough to follow a pattern, to stitch where you are told and to come away with something. When you instead follow your intuition, trusting that you have seen and felt colour and form sufficient to make something from them, is wilder. Threads get lost, fingers pricked, you’re not sure what to make of all the xs you’ve made. You move the needle through. Poems form this way.
My time in academia and in bookselling has knitted me close to a whole world of poets, many of whom write poetry that leaves me awestruck, poetry that is conceptual, clever, formally inventive, witty, and that I know are great but, like an amateur cross-stitcher looking at fine embroidery, I find myself unable to explain why. I don’t always understand how their threads move that way, but there they are: ///. Anne-Marie Turza, Erin Robinsong, D.M. Bradford, Jordan Abel, Emily Riddle, Seán Hewitt, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Canisia Lubrin: each their own shape, their shapes exceeding boundaries. I should be able to flip to their underside, look at their backing, and find the parts that make them great—these are the skills I’m expected to have honed as a PhD student—but my body resists this practice. I just want to listen to them, to the logic of their internal languages, to touch where their threads lift from the blank cream surface.
I feel a poem of my own is interesting when I manage to listen to my own internal language, when I can move away from the pattern and stitch my xs according to the world as I see it. I don’t know that those old patterns work today anyway, when we are sharing recurring and interminable crises, when the world is being remade and boundaries redrawn.
I’m not sure what makes a good poem. I’ve read plenty. I hope I have made one or two my own. Maybe it happens when I hold the canvas too tight, or pull too hard in some places, or knot too tightly the ends of my threads. Maybe it happens for me precisely when those old ways of doing things, when aesthetic correctness, are set down. Not to say my writing is radical or that it deviates significantly from poetic conventions, but just to say it has a mark where I held it in a way that felt right in my hand. Sometimes the flat sheet warps. Sometimes, when I put down the poem, it waves.
Jason Purcell [photo credit: Zachary Ayotte] is a writer from amiskwacîwâskahikan, Treaty 6. They are the author of Crohnic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025) and Swollening (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022).
