How does a poem begin?
How does a poem begin? The question sparks in me a small rebellion. How should I know? Why should I know? Who am I to begin to recognize beginnings? Are beginnings recognizable? Is a poem ever unbegun?
One risk of rebellion is cheekiness. I briefly thought of submitting for this column the word exfoliate 500 times, as a high-concept flash essay. I’m vaguely aware that most poems originate for me with something like porosity to the physical world, so the logic was — emphatically — keep your pores open. But cheekiness only gets you so far.
What I know is this: I experience a translucence to my surroundings that seems heightened. At times it can feel as if my skin simply does not end. As if no barrier exists between my physical being and my encounter with the world. What else is that but a persistent, figurative, ambulatory porosity?
But here comes the eternal problem of language: it slants things. I worry that the word porosity implicitly slants me toward particular forms of sensing. And I don’t want to forget bivalves. Or orb weavers. Or bracken. I want to remain open to the aspirational possibility of sensing beyond the human. Because maybe I am not only a translucent mammal, but also something of a clam, taking in the physical world and filtering it back out of the organ of my whole self.
And what about star-nosed moles? I would like some of that, please. Some of that tactile transduction. I would like a 22-pronged snout named for a celestial body, resembling a sea anemone, functioning as a touch organ with the processing speed of eye, and attached to a creature that is blind by human standards of sight. Who needs a large optic nerve when you can detect a coming earthquake? I would like to feel the world’s gulp-touch with electricity-sensing tentacles, digits, feelers, face-hands, rays! I would like no single word to do. Which is why porosity won’t.
I never believed five senses were enough. Five is a great number, sure. That’s the number of fingers many people have on one hand. The number of moons orbiting Pluto. Five years old: a great age to be! You’ve got language, mobility, the early parts of reading, maybe. Five is the number of dance steps the cha-cha spunkily fits into four beats of music. But when it comes to senses, sorry: it’s not enough. And five implies a sensory distinctness that is not true to my experience.
Writers I deeply admire have articulated well the heightened state from which poems might arise. Carolyn Forché has used the phrase meditative expectancy, and I like the impossibility of this term. To meditate is by nature to let go of expectation. To expect is to want in a way that should prohibit a meditative state. That a poet dwells in oxymoronic gristle feels genuine. The late C.D. Wright speaks of being wakeful, a state of attentiveness that primes her for ethical witness. Such wakefulness also makes sense to me as a valuable stance for encountering the world at large. Shouldn’t any given worldly moment invite the promise of witness? I like these terms: meditative expectancy, wakefulness. They overlap with my experience. But they do not completely capture it.
There is no single way toward a poem. Each poet should and will write this column differently. For me, when I see, hear, sit, or move among the things of this world — among trees and ferns and power lines and wind turbines and clams and tides and faces on the metro and faces in the digital muck and the pervasive disasters spiralling around us and my little dog and the strange contemporary conditions of childhood and materialism and health — their mysterious cocktail reaches out and shakes hands with the prevailing landscape of my gut-brain. And maybe those hands are tongues or tentacles or intricate noses or mental maps in the brains of rats or a willow’s arthritic creak following a climate-changed summer storm. And maybe there is only one such hand or maybe there are eleven or twenty-two. I am wakeful to the possibility that all of this is possible.
A poem begins for me, then, in a state of involuntary multisensorial wakefulness — but with conditions. Only if wakefulness reaches beyond attentiveness into what I might call compulsive ecological ardour. And only if ecological encompasses all forms of interconnectedness. And only if ardour signals a simultaneity of affinity and estrangement. No single word will ever do. The multifaceted world leaps through the complex sense organ of my whole self, which has been gasping with alertness all along. And off we go.
And maybe something I can eventually call a poem takes shape. If not, at least I have lived some heightened Earth-moments. That’s worth something, too, no matter whether a poem comes along.
Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the 2020 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, Geist, Arc, and Prairie Fire. Her work has also been anthologized in Rewilding: Poems for the Environment and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. Originally from Vermont, land also known as Ndakinna, she is a longtime resident of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
