How does a poem begin?
I’ve been reading the previous essays published here that respond to the question of how a poem begins/where poems come from. Otoniya J Okot Bitek refers to the poem as “a beggar at the ceiling of the mouth;” Julia Polyck O-Neill describes the involuntary emergence of the poem-object as “tenuous, irritating, visceral, somewhat liminal”. And so I enter my own relationship to this question from an intertextual space, the question itself a beggar at the ceiling of my mouth, both liminal and visceral.
The only way for me to answer this question is to return to Montreal, Concordia University, September 2001. A British Lit class in which we first-year students were called upon to study Wordsworth’s preface to The Lyrical Ballads and the iconic phrase “spontaneous overflow of feelings.” The noise of hundreds of student scratching notes on paper, the din of a large institution so incongruous with the quiet of pastoral England we were being asked to imagine, acted as a form of distortion. I couldn’t quite get where I was expected to be.
Later that day, we had a seminar with our TA who shook his head and said, “You’re not feeling it.” He had us cradle our 1200-page textbooks (feel the weight of this literature) and stand with our eyes closed while he slowly read “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” Then we were asked to slowly walk around the room and read for ourselves, to let the poem settle into our bodies.
At first, the images evoked nothing for me. I found them commonplace— I had grown up near a forest where the sun bent like bones through shafts of blue spruce. Time spooled as I bounded through ponderosas, burrs on my pillow every night. Then, something in the poem caught my interest:
In darkness and amid the
many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when
the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the
fever of the world,
Have hung upon the
beatings of my heart…
These words were the catalyst for my spontaneous overflow. I understood exactly what he meant by fretful stir, the fever, weight hung on a heart. I walked and read; I re-imagined his landscape, but through the lens of the subtextual fret and fever rather than the forced lens of reverence. On the cognitive map I’d drawn in my head of Tintern Abbey, a shimmering image of a goth girl began to form beside Wordsworth—she as the embodiment of this fret and fever. Sun streamed through her black hair, illuminated her curious expression as she read over Wordsworth’s shoulder. Wordsworth, in his reverie, did not notice her sitting so close.
That afternoon, as I remember, was just days after 9/11 and I could not read out of context—should we ever? As I cradled the weighty textbook while my passionate TA channelled centuries old sublimity, a type of genesis for my own emerging poetics occurred. Poetry-as-goth-girl made sense to me, especially two days after I’d watched the towers crumble in real time on my rabbit-eared TV. Since then, my poetic process has been to first consider through a dark lens; arrive at beauty through it rather than in opposition to it. This is how my poems still begin, twenty three years later—through corridors of dark inquiry that eventually lead to wider, brighter rooms.
Like a serpent, goth girl can swallow that which
is much larger than her. Her gentle teeth glint as she hinges her mouth wide,
creeps to where Wordsworth attempts to translate his overflowing emotions into
words. Soon, she is flexed. Soon, he finds himself in cavernous dark. He
blinks. He inhales this gorgeous dark. Yet holding Wordsworth in her mouth is
not an act of subsummation or eradication for goth girl. The goal is to subtly
shift, not to consume. He rests in her jaw for a moment and when he emerges,
blinking, he revisits the landscape in a more nuanced way.
I came across that perfect juxtaposition—"the gorgeous dark”— in a poem by Jenn Currin. When I am attentive, I find this gorgeous dark everywhere—Sanna Wani writes “the sun, a wound on your windowsill” in her poem “Memory is Sleeping.” The gorgeous dark is integral to the work of Ocean Vuong but is distinctly remarkable here:
That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.
Yes, I arrive at my poems through dark inquiry, but I am always seeking a type of dichotomy that is less of a helix and more of a liminal blend. Every time I sit down to write a poem, I let the jaws swallow me, but just long enough to return with nuance rather than submerge. Then, I settle into the liminal space, the gorgeous dark, and from there I write.
Leesa Dean is the author of two books (Waiting for the Cyclone, The Filling Station) and two above/ground chapbooks (The Desert of Itabira, Apogee/Perigee). Her third book, Interstitial, will be published by Gaspereau Press in Spring 2026. Dean is a graduate of the University of Guelph's MFA program and teaches creative writing at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC where she also helps run the Black Bear Review. In 2022, she was runner-up for the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. She lives on a small acreage in Krestova, BC, where she can often be found overthinking her own poetics amidst the lupins.
