How does a poem begin?
Looking at this question– How does a poem begin?– feels a bit like being trapped in a room with mirrors on opposite walls. I look one way and the question is asking the qualities with which a poem begins and there stand an infinite string of adverbs. A poem begins urgently, gingerly, hauntingly, detachedly, boldly, skeptically. Each adverb stands firm in its purpose. Each is correct.
I look the other way and the question is asking about the possibility of poetry, with an emphasis on the does in the question. The odds are stacked against poetry. And yet, poems begin every day. How? There, in the mirror, are all of the poets who have revealed to me the infinite possibilities: June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Mahmoud Darwish. At the front of that chain are the poets who have been recently martyred in Gaza, like Refaat Alareer and Hiba Abu Nada.
With the impossibility of choosing among these infinite hows, I turn instead to a different question: Where does a poem begin? I know, I know, changing the question is a cop out. But, for me, the where is how you get to the how. The where is a particular point at the intersection of the many planes on which poetry exists.
The first where is where the speaker is. Sometimes, even in the “final draft” (whatever that means), the author and the speaker are both clueless as to where the speaker begins that particular poem. The lack of knowing is, too, a point on the speaker’s plane. It may actually be the most specific where. The speaker’s bedroom or ocean or left fingernail are shifting targets, moving forever towards the reader’s own bedroom or ocean or left fingernail.
The second where is where the author is. The room, home, country, empire within the poem is written are inextricable from the poem beginning.
The third where is where the heart of the poem is. Forgive me for the triteness, but before each poem is a particular breath in, and that particular breath is powered by a particular heartbeat. This is the most critical where which then informs the most critical how– one that answers more directly the second mirror that I posed. It is the where that contributes to a poem’s possibility and how it opens up something in the reader. It is the where that decides which side of history the poem lies upon. It decides how the poem sinks or swims.
Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, the Permanent Record Anthology from Nightboat Books, and elsewhere.
