How does a poem begin?
I want the same thing from a poem that I want from every new day of my life: to be surprised. Not disgusted or threatened, but surprised in the way I was as a child—by the novelty of something. The fuzzy brush of the back of a caterpillar against your fingertip, or the way candle wax drips, creating mesmerizing abstracts. Or when you run face-first into a sliding door you thought was open, leaving you embarrassed more than maimed, and stunned more than hurt.
I want a poem to point into the dark corner under the porch. I want it to lead me there and stay. And while I’m big on needing surprise from my poetry, I am not too concerned with how a poem achieves this end. I am open to being surprised by many approaches and forms. I think of Kyle Flemmer's lunar flag poems in his new collection, Supergiants (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) where poems are shaped like flags, with blacked out spaces, mimicking holes in the actual lunar flag and humankind’s impressive, but cosmically feeble attempt to leave our mark on the universe.
Aisha Sasha John's poetry: I never know where it is going to take me, but it is often structurally sparse but replete in intrinsic sense. The combination is ticklish and never ceases to move me in unexpected directions.
“Sestina” by Ciara Shuttleworth is one of the most memorable surprises of my poetic life. Ciara cycles only six words across seven stanzas to upend meaning, starting with:
You
used
to
love
me
well.
What I am saying is that I want my poems to play: play in the way we all play. To engage with the world and each other and ourselves, without coercion or fear. Though play is not inherently joyful. When we play, we might get hurt. We might cry a little. Somebody might kick us in the face by mistake skinning the cat on the monkey bars. They might get off the teeter totter while we are perched high on the other end. But we will probably learn something too. Where to stand. Whom to trust.
For me, play is also at the heart of how a poem begins. I am always trying to work my way through a puzzle. There's a feeling (it's almost always a feeling with me), I find fundamentally crucial to who I am and how I see the world and I am trying to think of how to express that feeling without losing the fully realized and ebbing nature of feeling anything. How do I show a feeling in language without language limiting the indefinable, slippery nature of emotion?
For instance, as Poet Laureate of Scugog Township, I’ve been asked to write a poem every year for the annual Christmas tree lighting, and every year, I’m presented with the same puzzle: How do I write something that feels authentic to who I am, but that’s also accessible to the community in which I live: five-year-olds. 105 year-olds. This is probably not a poem in which I can talk about my cervix again. Or disclose my search history. But I know I must have many things in common with the people in my community, and I want to tap into a slice of our common humanity without being disengagingly vague. I don’t want to write greeting card poetry. I need to be specific while expressing something universal.
The poem I ended up writing this year started with me thinking about how I often cry at symphonies or parades or concerts. Being surrounded by people who are experiencing the same thing as me: the same beauty, the same fleeting moment in time—the precious fragility of that shared space—it reduces me to tears. Joyful, tormented tears.
So I tried to capture a little bit of that feeling.
My hope was that, in this world of divisive rhetoric, echo chambers, and us-versus-them mentality, it might surprise people to remember that there will always be more that unites us than divides us. There will always be something to bring us together. We have common ground. And we’re standing on it.
