How does a poem begin?
First, it might be useful to know that poems are objects. For me, these objects roll around, taking shape, sometimes quietly and sometimes not, for minutes or days or sometimes longer, before they beg to be rendered material. They start as immaterial objects, then. Often, they form in the substrate of my ideas as I see an artwork or exhibition or read and/or write an academic text or prepare a lecture or seminar (my day job, which is really more of a perpetual job if I reflect on it). One might liken this to the formation of a pearl from a grain of sand, but frequently it’s much more like the formation of a tumorous growth (sometimes benign, sometimes not). Christine McNair puts this feeling nicely into words, though she may have been describing a different process entirely: “I feel dried upon flaked upon / flecked impignated impinged upon . . . I devalue ask permission / make and unafford” (79). The poem object emerges involuntarily. As you can tell, the process is tenuous, irritating, visceral, somewhat liminal, and bound by the uneven constraints of attention.
Claire Bishop observes how attention is inherently mutable and has been reorganized in time with economic globalization and the internet, both of which figure in the spectrum of my research and thinking. Bishop argues that, pursuant to these changes, artmaking itself has manifested new strategies for creative engagement and expression in response to “new technologies of information and image circulation” that can be “unconscious, oblique, internalized, or ambivalent” (5), suggesting an emergent paradigm wherein things like poem-thinking and poem-making are intertwined with the noise and circumstances of contemporary life – capitalism, relationships, politics, climate disaster. Given that my poems are often written in response to both technology, information, and circulating images, and often emerge alongside other forms of thinking, perhaps what I mean to say is that poems, as objects, are formed not out of choice or habit, but out of necessity, of a process of thinking-feeling that’s both heartfelt and intellectually driven but also of something I can’t immediately access.
Lately I’ve been wondering about my language for such operations and now I’m considering revising what I wrote above – is a poem a thought, or does it appear by means (in full or in part) of a process Katherine Hayles calls “unthought,” part of the “cognitive nonconscious” or the shadows between biological perception and thought, areas “inaccessible to conscious introspection but nevertheless essential for consciousness to function” (1). Somewhere beyond my apprehension but embedded in my self, or what I sense as my self, poems are forming. I wonder about this because I often feel my conscious thinking is dedicated to the task at hand and poems seem to materialize in a space outside, or rather, deeper inside, as a translation or effect. The poem object carries with it unexpected traces of ideas, images, texts, events, dreams, conversations, relations, affects that I sense have been processed elsewhere and presented to me when I finally eject it on the page.
Works Cited
Bishop, Claire. Disordered
Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Verso, 2024.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Unthought: The
Power of the Cognitive Unconscious. Chicago UP, 2017.
McNair, Christine. Charm.
Book*hug, 2017.
Julia Polyck-O’Neill (they/she) is an artist, curator, critic, poet, and writer. They are an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland. Their research explores feminist, digital approaches to interdisciplinary artists’ archives and intersections between archives and creative praxis. They have published four chapbooks with above / ground press, including Process (2024) and poem / image / self: Adrian Piper’s Catalysis (2019).
