How does a poem begin?
I grew up with parents who were avid readers. Neither parent policed my reading and by the time I was twelve I was reading books I found lying around the house – western and crime pulp fiction, science fiction, contemporary fiction of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The vocabulary was frequently out of reach and from my prone place on the couch with a stack of crackers and Velveeta cheese on the coffee table beside me, I would holler “Mom, what does “tipple” mean?” At first, she answered all my questions but eventually her standard reply became, “Look it up in the dictionary.”
In university, a professor chided my use of unconventional words and advised me to use simpler language to achieve greater clarity. This was at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s where all around me ordinary Newfoundlanders created colourful metaphors with ease. (I remember a caller to a radio show who described a local politician as “Lower than an eel in a bucket of snot.”) Maybe I was using words to cover up my metaphoric mediocrity? At any rate, the poems I gravitate towards are written in plain, direct language and use metaphors that make me tingle.
When I retired in 2020, I asked my employer to forego the usual farewell gifts for a cash equivalent. I bought the Canadian Oxford Dictionary – 2nd edition, a two-inch-thick tome of 1,830 tissue light pages that, when viewed sideways, has alphabetic indents, like stairs, for ease of locating words. On its side, the page edges appear speckled with blue ink, as though a scribe had lost control of her pen. I like the translucent pages that show more words below the word I am looking up which partly describes the way I write poetry. One word leads to another and another and another.
In the Pandemic winter of 2021, I read about Contemporary Verse 2’s (CV2) 2-Day Poem Contest and decided to enter. In preparation, I asked my husband to give me a list of ten unusual words every Saturday morning from which I would generate a poem and submit it to him by midnight Sunday of the same weekend. We began this process in early February so that by the date of the contest at the end of April I was well prepared to make poems out of a list of cranky, unwieldy, archaic, and often polysyllabic words.
A friend chuckled at the exercise saying it
reminded her of elementary school vocabulary lists. Immediately I recalled Mrs.
MacKenzie, my grade six teacher, who used this tool and required her pupils to
write a story using a dozen words of her choosing. I aced that exercise every
week.
The exercise proved incredibly fruitful and though I didn’t get close to winning, I had a clutch of poems to work with and submit in the coming years. Three I placed in flo. literary magazine, and one I sent to Bywords in September 2024 – The Right Kind of Unctuous Cream – which was plucked from all the year’s submissions to win the 2025 John Newlove Award.
Susanne Fletcher lives in the Ottawa’s south end near Sawmill Creek, one of the many streams that flow into the Rideau River. She walks along the path that follows the creek year-round taking inspiration from what the stream environment delivers. Susanne's short fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction can be found in The New Quarterly, Bywords, flo., Existere, among others.