How does a poem begin?
A poem begins by having already
discarded the notion that it must take a certain form. A poem begins in an
openness to materials and a refusal to cut off avenues of approach that might
best succeed in transmitting the communiqué.
- Jonald Ronsan
What makes a good poem and how does a poem begin? I suppose it’s akin to cutting your foot on glass. First the surprise and wonder that something is happening, the vague notion that an event is occurring and that you are afflicted, perhaps, and somehow at the center of the experience though a thousand miles away. And then the ever increasing horror that it insists on persisting through the dumb moment into the solidifying next. In this way the poem has likely never changed a great deal, or the experience of it, the sneaking up through layers of reality until the wound gives and you’re all in. Both meeting it on or off the page as composed by another and as it spills from you, which is to say either. Which is to say there is a strong element of tradition in, really, any poem, regardless of formal breaks and border blur.
Despite the academic quantification and qualification of poetry through graded analysis and the attempt to muster science through the shining flit of sudden knowing by no means identifiable exactly, the poem is good because we know it is and everything else is auxiliary, a boon to the blessing already. Does it ring? Are you open? Surely a poem takes you by surprise, how else could you fall in love with it? On the first reading or the tenth. Reading or writing it.
But to get down to brass tax, the cost of price in the theory and guess, if the poem has often presented itself lately as seeming less concerned than once with looking like a poem or even reading like one we might thank an experience of being that is neck deep in the sucking bog of predatorial multi-media vampirism, or what we might refer to as entertainments. Not only have we become accustomed to the still-strange entrapment and constriction of zany and inane cash grabs at the mind and body pacifying the spirit that moves both (but they’re the same,) but we lose the thread of the sentence in the daily commute, however that translates. A homogenized dyslexia of the car-confined raging individual. Perhaps. Both fast and slow. Being torn apart. Aghast, banally. Powerless and driven, if only by yourself.
And, when it has no home and is an embarrassing admission, what is poetry today besides an absurd hobby you die for? Don’t you bring it to light any way that you can? Though the light shines on a dusty vacant corner. Vacant but for a piece of glass that half-remembers a foot. And then feet. The cadence of the cut that bleeds the bog. To breathe clearly, if only for a moment, through the clotted air with no gains but that.
There is nothing at stake but oneself. For what that’s worth. And this is how we say it,
Sacha Archer is a concrete poet residing in Burlington, Ontario. His most recent book is Havana Syndrome published by The Blasted Tree. Some of Archer’s other publications include Sweet Sixteen (Zimzalla), cellsea (Timglaset), Empty Building (Penteract Press), Mother’s Milk (Timglaset), which was included on CBC’s best poetry books of 2020 list, Perverse Density (above/ground press) and In Remembrance of Lost Children (Paper View Books). Find him on Facebook and Instagram @sachaarcher.
