How does a poem begin?
There are three anatomical elements that best describe where my poems come from:
1) I’m a “process poet”, an intrinsic part of which – at least for me – is that my poetry almost always begins with words or texts that I’m not the writer of. The final poem may not always bear much relation to these originary texts, but I’m always cognizant of the fact that that’s where it started.
2) I approach my poems – and the words, letters and sounds that comprise them – as if they were material objects. To my mind, making a poem better is usually a function of moving the words, letters or sounds around until they work… or of not moving them around.
3) I approach my poems as experiments. This isn’t “capital E” Experimental Poetry – this is just me wanting to see what happens when I combine a text from this source with a text from that source and apply this process to it or do that thing to it. Sometimes this will produce something interesting… and sometimes it won’t.
The specifics, of course, will vary wildly from project to project – and I do approach these as projects, regardless of whether one poem comes out of them, none, or a series of a dozen.
How a poem begins is a separate question. For me, a poem begins with an idea. Sometimes it’s an idea I’ve just tripped over, sometimes it’s an idea I’ve gone looking for, and sometimes it’s when a couple of ideas (or texts, or images, or forms) have collided in front of me and produced a new idea. I don’t think I buy the idea of poetic inspiration… but I do think you need to keep your eyes and your mind open enough so that when interesting words and ideas go past you, you’re aware enough to notice.
For instance, I’m currently working on a series of manifesto poems. The initial impulse for this came last year when the form of a one-sheet folded signature that a friend sent me collided with the writings of the early Surrealists I’d been studying in Art History. The idea of a series of short manifestos that fit this one page form just kind of popped out of this collision… which sent me looking for some sources to use and a process to employ. In my first couple of experiments I really liked the poems that resulted, but it became apparent that they weren’t going to fit comfortably into the one page form – so I’ve put that part of the idea aside for future consideration, and am now working on these longer manifesto-poems.
Ultimately, I’m not usually trying to say anything or prove anything with my poems, I’m just playing with words and ideas and seeing what comes out the other end. I’ve generally found that once I’ve identified the gravitational centre of a poem, if I get out of the way, the words & ideas I’ve worked into my process will generally create something interesting.
Grant Wilkins is an occasional poet, printer and papermaker who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he’s working on another one in Art History. He lives in Ottawa on the unceded and unsurrendered land of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people.
