How does a poem begin?
A poem begins unexpectedly. As poetry morphs and changes, I think this sentiment will always be true.
There are so many times I’ve sat in front of a blank Word document or with a pen and blank notebook page in hand, willing a poem to begin. I’ve since learned that in order for a poem to begin, I have to let the idea of the poem go.
I’m writing this at a residency at Gibraltar Centre for the Arts. The centre is built for art-making—I have my own studio, I have nothing but time to write, and I’m surrounded by other artists. And yet, poems aren’t flowing out of me. I want to bike around Toronto Island, sketch farm animals, and look out for the CN Tower—I want to do everything except write.
Poems start in workshops. Poems start out of conversations around a dinner table. Poems come out memes on Instagram. Poems come from springtime flowers. Poems start in the middle of poetry readings. Poems come from thousands of dead fish washed up out of Lake Ontario after a storm. Poems start where you least expect them. The twists and turns of a poem that surprise and startle readers should surprise you as a writer too. This means there’s a difficulty in planning out a poem before it begins.
I’ve written poems that have come out in a rush, but the idea of the poem has spent a long time percolating in my mind and my body before it’s ever put to the page. Poems begin most easily when I’m spending my time immersed in poemness—reading poetry, listening to poetry, doing the things that the poetry community has to offer both online and in my community. And I try not to let things oversteep either. If the words want to come out, there’s no point holding them inside while waiting for the perfect moment. I’d like to write while watching waves lap onto a shore, a gentle breeze around me. But sometimes I have to be hunched over my laptop, furiously tapping away.
As I write this article, I also have a commissioned poem due. The poem is supposed to be about a river. I spend lots of time walking and biking and sitting along the Ottawa River, watching cormorants cluster on small islands. Every autumn, I’m in Mississauga and stand on a bridge over the Credit River watching salmon struggle to swim upstream. In order to write this commissioned poem, though, I can’t plan out a river experience to draw upon—I have to let the riverness flow out of me.
In short, I have to trust that there is always a poem’s beginning lurking beneath the surface of whatever I’m doing at any given time.
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Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist from Karachi, Pakistan, now based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022). She was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. She is the co-creator of Reth aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary project exploring folklore from Pakistan through poetry, sculpture, and community arts. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
