How does a poem begin?
A poem, for me, does not so much begin as end. Once I start writing, the poem is over. Nothing feels more like a poem than the moment before the poem exists, the point of no return during which I know something will be produced, that I will produce something.
That's a lie, of course. Nothing feels more like a poem than a poem, on the page or on the screen. But it's also true, in that my culturally mediated understanding of "what a poem is" is entirely constructed around poetry's artful fluidity, or gaseousness, and these stages of the cycle seem to disappear when a poem condenses into being.
I'm usually more practical than this — let's try again. A poem begins when I come up with a title for it. I like to do things in order, and so, almost always, the title comes first. That means, however, that I must already have a clear idea of what's going to follow the title, which means the poem has already begun before the title exists. The poem begins in my mind. That's boring.
And dishonest. I often write in response to prompts, and so the poem begins when whoever thought up the prompt (sometimes that's me) thought it up. So, the poem begins in someone else's mind, except sometimes that someone else is simply me.
Here are some poems I want to write: about feeling like a magpie (shiny things, mirror test, brood parasitism); about Harlow's wire-mother/cloth-mother tests in re: the stuffed "mother" dog my dog likes to hump; about how self-awareness circles back around to its opposite; about those few months in 2015, the promiscuous ones. Have these poems begun?
Now they have:
"Passing the Mirror Test"
"He's Fucking His Mother Again"
"No, Myself"
"In Top Form"
I'm kidding, of course — at least one of these is a terrible title. But I'm not kidding about the process, about that feeling of inversion. A poem, for me, is an ending following by a beginning. There's a freedom in that reversal: something that's over before it begins never needs to end.
Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022) and his work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Fiddlehead, GEIST, Grain, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and Riddle Fence. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, is forthcoming with Brick Books in 2026.
