How does a poem begin?
Growing up where I did (Yukon Territory, 80s/90s, in a “no electricity, no running water” situation), two things made a good poem for me: 1) It was in The Heath Introduction to Poetry, or, 2) It was in The New American Poetry: 1945-1960. Battered copies of these books had found their way into my unwashed hands and I mined them eagerly for all I could learn of syntax, symbol, sonnet form and New York City.
Having wrangled myself a scholarship, I made it out to university in Ontario, where I buddied up with the writers but studied math and physics. A grad-school dropout, I wound up back in the Yukon. Got a job crunching numbers, writing bits of code in R and SQL. Hung around with a set of displaced reggae musicians, learning to hear the full linguistic richness of Jamaican English. Sat up at the bar, trading bullshit with the old-timers. I was still reading The New American Poetry: 1945-1960.
I want to divert for a minute and talk about some things that aren’t poetry. It’s Easter weekend and my husband and I are driving out to Thechàl Dhâl (Sheep Mountain), north of Haines Junction. The visitor centre is closed, but we park and wander down a side road towards a couple of dilapidated cabins. I duck around a corner to take a peek through a dusty window. Freeze—seeing a human shape standing in the shadowed room. Motionless. It’s a lifesized mannequin, dressed in a long skirt, cardigan and headscarf in the style of First Nations grannies. She’s posed at a table, her rather realistic hands resting on the keyboard of an elderly computer with beige CRT monitor. Is it art? Is it a prank? It’s a secret installation in the woods, on the edge of a highway somewhere north of 60.
On the drive back. we’ve got the tunes cranked, specifically Yung Pooda’s Drop. “I’ve got to go cause I got me a drop-top,” says Ice Cube on the sample. We hit the outro where the track just cycles on the word “drop,” like, “drop-drop-drop-drop-drop-p-op-op-p-drop.” I wonder what you could do on the page that would feel the way this sounds.
Another day in winter we’re in the car again, heading out of town to pick up a set of 1968 Encyclopedia Britannica from a friend of my father-in-law. (Later I’m reading Kerouac’s letters to Ginsberg about how he’s delighted with his acquisition of the 1911 Britannica, which is, doing the math, exactly as old for Kerouac as the 1968 edition is for me). The road’s elevated above a lake, so we’re looking down a snowy slope to a line of ice, then water, then mountain bifurcated by linear white cloud, then blue sky the same shade as the lake, then a bank of cloud the same shade as the snow, and for a moment the world inverts—we’re driving upside-down—somehow we maintain traction and steer through this illusion til things flip back and we’re on a road on the ground in a subdivision just outside of Whitehorse.
These things aren’t poems but these things are what I want from poems. It flips you over. You don’t know how it’s done. You’re not even sure if it’s art.
It doesn’t take a fancy vocabulary, necessarily. Bukowski could do it, in words of one syllable. Dickinson could do it—in less than one syllable—with a stroke—. Jamaican English could do it for me, because I didn’t speak Jamaican English, so everything hit me fresh. They talk about things being Ital, about holding a firm Itation, the thing that is fully itself. They say I and I, the multi-dimensional, relational self.
Maxwell’s equations are good poetry, a tight pair of couplets twinning the electric and magnetic field. The old-timers up at the bar, well, it’s almost bad poetry just to say that their talk is a kind of poetry, but it is that still. Most of my R code is terrible poetry, kludgy and copied off Stack Overflow, but I have a special love for everything kludgy and terrible and pasted together.
So, what am I saying here? Good poetry begins in misunderstanding. Or, a good poet is a serious bullshitter. Or I’m bullshitting you right now—it’s pretty obvious I have no idea what I’m talking about.
I keep going back to those lines from Archibald Macleish, in The Heath Introduction to Poetry: “A poem should not mean / But be.”
Or to quote at more sprawling length from Kenneth Koch, in The New American Poetry 1945-1960:
The only thing I could publicize well would be my teeth,
Which I could say came with my mouth and in a most engaging manner
With my whole self, my body and including my mind,
Spirits, emotions, spiritual essences, emotional substances, poetry, ....
...
It is possible that the dentist is smiling, that he dreams of extraction
Because he believes that the physical tooth and the spiritual tooth are one.
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. Her debut poetry collection, Northerny, came out from University of Alberta Press in 2024. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Arc Poetry, CV2, DUSIE, Freefall, and Okay Donkey.
