How does a poem begin?
My mother told me I’d never get anywhere in life because I am a poor speller. I went to art school because I thought I was illiterate. I learned to write alongside material practices. Stitching, felting, sawing, welding. Cutting with scissors and pasting with glue. I learned to write critically. It was critical to write. To get somewhere in life. And then spell-check was invented. And then the internet happened. There I learned to write nonlinearly, intertextually, hypertextually, spatially, spaciously. I learned to take up space. I learned that writing takes place. It happens. It’s an event. That’s where, or when, things started to get interesting. I lived in Montreal for a long time. There I learned to write in English as a minority language. A tongue not my mother’s. Rivers in my mouth. You can only take. So much place. Now I live in England, where my English will forever mark me as a foreigner. A tongue not mine mutters. Utters accent. You ate words. Emigration twisted my tongue. Fried my brain. Here I learned to write in fragments. To piece. To gather. Together. I learned to write in collaboration. With other writers, artists, and musicians. With other writing. With archives. I learned to rewrite. To reread. To research. I am searching for strangeness in English. So my English doesn’t sound so strange. Recently a collaborator who is also musician told me: you’re searching for how you sound. I am learning to write by sounding out. Of sound mind and body. A body of work has accrued in this way. Books made of sewing, linking, sounding, piecing. Now I teach Englsih. Did that just happen? I’m going to let that spelling mistake stand. To see where it gets me. In life. IRL. AFK. Recently a colleague asked me: What makes a good poem? This seems like a trick question. At first. The good part is a red herring. The answer lies in the making. A good poem unfolds in the manner that it was gathered up. A poem made of archives. Jots notes and sketches. A poem made of river. Is made of sky also. A poem made by walking. Depends on where it’s going. Now I live in Yorkshire. Everything is up from here. So if you’re asking me. where pome is. this body is. all I’ve got. to move forward with. breathing. burning. thighs. and eyes. and lungs. a poem is made of onwards. and wind is made entirely of hair.
J. R. Carpenter is a queer artist, writer, researcher, and lecturer in the School of English at University of Leeds, UK. Recent poems have been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, highly commended for the Forward Prize, and published in The Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, Oxford Poetry, Chicago Review, and The Capilano Review. Their most recent collection, Measures of Weather (Shearsman Books) was The Observer’s poetry book of the month and a finalist for the Laurel Prize 2025. Their next collection, p a u s e, will be published by Broken Sleep Books, January 2026. For more information visit: https://luckysoap.com
