How does a poem begin?
When Mary Oliver writes in "Wild Geese," "You do not have to be good" I wonder if she was also referring to poems. Do poems need to be good?
I wonder if a more apt way to ask this question is what makes a poem so committed to its subject, feelings, sensibilities, internal rhythms and contradictions, so wise to both the self and the world, and so vulnerable, that you as the reader become totally rapt in its world and come out the other side, forever changed? I do not think a poem that has dubious ethical values and intentions can create this impact on me. I do not think a poem that withholds too much of itself can do that, either. And that is why the process of reading poetry is so subjective: for whom does the mere act of waking up break their heart? For whom and what occasions do some lines strike harder?
Cameron Awkward-Rich's "Meditations in an Emergency" is shared yearly on Trans Day of Remembrance and often on occasions of deep tragedy for queer and trans people of colour. The poem insists, "Like you, I was born." And in that simple(?) declaration, the poem confronts a whole world of violence and agony with a hand (whose?) resting on one's heart. People often say it is cliché to use the word "heart" in a poem, but why isn't it clichéd here? The poem insists on you, the reader, following the speaker's heartbreak throughout a day and across a lifetime, pondering what makes that heart shatter in the first place. Who or what would you have to be for your heart not to shatter? The poem gives you permission to feel the heartbeat of the speaker, their pain and rebellious acts of dreaming, and sit in the fact that amidst witnessing and feeling the magnitude of violent structures everywhere, this is a beating heart that still hopes—because a heart cannot break if it's closed off to the world.
Maybe it’s that permission that prompts so many of us to return to this poem year after year, occasion after emergency occasion.
"Like you, I was born" is so resonant in so many poetic concerns, these days. I think about Mary Shelley's creature and the ugly laws we have allowed to return in various policies targeting poor, disabled, mad, Black, Indigenous, and racialized people on this continent and beyond. I also feel there is a multivalence to this affect of vulnerability. We often assume that vulnerability means, merely, tenderness. Or softness. Or gentleness. But there is also a vulnerability in expressing rage, anger, resolve, and defiance. To show the world your rage—the underbelly, where it comes from, what it teaches you, you must be vulnerable.
In "Safe Harbor in Enemy Homes," Rasha Abdulhadi asks, "Who among us can take a retreat from horrors, who seeks to beat a hasty one from consequence or scrutiny"? In this poem (and in our world), "[e]ven the trees are not blameless here— / they choose sides, shelter conspiracy, and lend their limbs to massacre." On one level, this poem insists that it is the zionist, colonial literary institutions that should be afraid of the true power of poems, because the speaker's "words endure in the frayed spine. / Peel back the coversheet and find: / I'm in your retreat, righting where the pages / of the deep south touch palestine."
I’m drawn to poems that pierce through the propaganda and bullshit, that teach us to look—for the intimacies of colonial processes, the inseparable connections between here and there. Through this poem I am reminded of the street trees in Vancouver, designed to cater to unaffordable developments on the occupied territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, the stolen wood comprising temples in Japan, the fact that the Israeli Occupation Forces train police departments across Turtle Island, the racist deeds on the British Properties banning Black and Asian people in what's colonially known as West Vancouver, and in mongruch over-harvesting within traditional Chinese medicine industries.
Awkward-Rich writes, “There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.” To dream of that world we one day love is to know the one we live in more deeply.
The defiance in Abdulhadi's poem is a similar defiance in Awkward-Rich's, its anger echoing with a similar resounding vulnerability, if not aimed with the same specificity. I look for that magic in all poems I read.
How does a poem begin?
A poem likely begins when you have something scary, painful, shameful, difficult, or intense you really need to express but don't know exactly what. That urge conjures up something so powerful that it's bigger than you. You momentarily forget who you are (if depersonalization is something you experience…), or maybe it reminds you more acutely of who you are and where you come from, and all that that means.
Think of all the moments throughout a day or late night where you are humming with awe or presence (or absence). You feel the need to lurch onto that hum and there's no way to express the hum other than a poem, whatever those words that begin it may be.
I began writing poetry as a child because I was fascinated with language. I continued to write poetry as a teenager because I needed to create a covert language with myself to express difficult feelings. Nowadays I begin poems because I am angry or sad or can’t get something out of my head. I think poems often begin with obsessions. Zaccheus Jackson Nyce, the late Blackfoot spoken word poet I often credit for quietly inviting me into poetry communities as a young adult, wrote and performed poems to heal from the impacts of colonization. The spirited way he spoke about poetry as storytelling and healing reminds me that poetry begins in humility.
Diana Khoi Nguyen's poem "A Bird in Chile, and Elsewhere" begins her debut poetry collection Ghost Of with the line, "There is no ecologically safe way to mourn." I remember this line often because it reminds me that life and death are deeply intertwined. And that mourning is part of those cyclical processes, but it's also embedded in the violent processes structuring our lives. And to loop back to Abdulhadi's poem earlier: "Even the trees are not blameless here—" These two opening lines feel like ideas that you can't get out of your head, that gnaw at you. What does it mean for mourning to be dangerous, for trees to be complicit in colonization? Do we not live in a world where we are taught to erase the impacts of mass death, and consequently mass mourning, to romanticize the tree and consequently the white, hippie tree hugger? And if that is the world we live in, how do we live and mourn?
At least, my brain goes there when I think of these lines. But the poems themselves, while goading us to think, also begin with a feeling, begin with the body, begin with an instinct. Begin with hand on heart.
Jane Shi is a poet, writer, and organizer living on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. She is the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022) and the winner of The Capilano Review’s 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest. Her debut poetry collection echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024) was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her recent essays appear in Read This When Things Fall Apart (AK Press, 2025), We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities (Haymarket Books, 2025), Midnight Sun Mag, and Disability Visibility Project blog. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.
