How does a poem begin?
Poetry comes to me often—while walking, while cleaning, while riding the metro, while having a coffee, while reading others’ poems. Some nights, lines force me from bed every hour, pulsing the black sea between dream and thought. Words coalesce on the first drops of birdsong; rhymes wreathe my forearm in barbs of blue pen. In notebooks and notes apps, on margins and whiteboards, on post-its like bright leaves that bury my desk, words trail me constantly. Whenever I’m thinking, a poem might begin.
Or maybe I should say, a poem might end. Because the lines that bombard me are almost always endings.
*
I write, every day. I quit writing, every day.
For better or for worse, a poem is self-indulgent. For better and for worse, if you are a person at odds with herself.
Some of my friends write their poems in short bursts, sprinting start to finish within half an hour. This must be a very different experience of consciousness: to stand immersed in your thoughts, uninterrupted, for that length of time. Because it is a long time—I can’t do that without some(thing? one?) intruding.
When I sit down to write, I set aside hours, sort through months of notes. I make dozens of drafts, plan for inner arguments. Take notes, get up, pace.
My poems come in fragments, the way I tell stories: cut to the ending as fast as I can. One breathless sentence before my throat closes. Before I can think what I might have said wrong.
*
I envy the seeming solidity of others. I know it isn’t really that simple, but everyone else looks to be, from the outside, so wholly themself. Even that word, individual: what cannot be split.
I am deeply split. Self-consciousness means being several incomplete people at once: one who acts, one who watches them acting; one who thinks, one who questions the thought. One right now asking, am I making this up?
One who writes and one who edits. Are you doing that right? the Editor asks.
Despite my discomfort praising myself, I will admit: I’m an excellent editor. I have no problem killing my darlings. I can erase the whole day.
*
Sometimes, words arrive as bodily rhythm: dark racing heat, fist palpating my heart. Poems pump my legs all up and down Sherbrooke, walk me through black glowing pinprick-lit streets.
I write to release the sensory pressure. To collimate chains of astigmatic taillights, red and white lights streaming under the overpass. Arterial sky, frost in the air, beer cans, rain pinging on emptiness, leaflitter, rust. The trees burst into vein.
Sometimes, I don’t think I know the difference between beauty and physical pain. There’s only awareness of something too big to keep held in my body.
Poetry comes as chant, bloody colour, as anger and joy, as bad-mannered survival, as raw-nerved insistence. It burns off all shame like a layer of skin, and I hope and worry that I will never be wordless again.
Sometimes.
Other times, poetry is sluggish. I wake with my limbs full of stones, eyes unfocused, grope in the blank word by word for a mind. Force myself into the afternoon daylight, get food in my body, some sugar and steps. Try to put myself back in the world.
I Google the names of grasses and sparrows, writing them down because I know I’ll forget.
Something eats my thoughts and I try to describe it, to write the poem as it edits me out.
*
My personal definition of depression is the inability to tolerate one’s own mind. Writing, to me, is the opposite (notice I do not say the cure): to believe in the possibility of meaning. To choose one’s thoughts over their absence. To believe in a reader who wants more from a poem than the poet’s erasure.
The Editor says I should not write this. That it is selfish, melodramatic, trying to be special.
I tell her I write because I’m trying to exist, and the Editor says this is cliché and self-serious. That my reason for writing is also the reason that I should not write.
I have started this essay several dozen times.
*
I write, Winter sparrow. Clay-coloured sparrow. Fox sparrow, swamp sparrow, dark-eyed junco. White-crowned, white-throated, black-throated, field, common, house, song.
I often have a hard time thinking. There are times that means it’s hard to form thoughts, and there are times it means the thoughts hurt. Both states shatter my access to language. Clots of ending couplets. Then nothingness.
Then something, again. Where does it come from?
Awake until dawn, my mind runs its hands up and down a thoughts’ splinters, picking a scab. Waiting for birdsong. No sparrows. Grey dawn.
A plow scrapes the edges, a substance, a sound.
There: something outside myself. Write it down.
*
I mean it when I say I am a good editor. But it was through teaching that I realized this didn’t mean what I’d thought it meant.
Working with students, I noticed two things. Firstly, that I was kinder to their poems than my own—in each student’s work, I could find something startling, some image or phrase uniquely alive to an original, inimitable consciousness. And, secondly, that I wasn’t lying.
I had been proud of my unsentimentality, proud of holding myself to a high standard—proud, paradoxically, of my shame. But working with students led me to wonder how much of what I’d considered brutal honesty had been merely brutality.
We live in a world that speaks of intelligence, success, and work ethic as linear and hierarchical. As if these are restricted to one sort of person, inherently deserving, inherently superior. Leaving the rest of us told to try harder, yet told it is shameful to need to try at all.
This worldview cannot comprehend difference as anything other than deficit. One is a person, or one is a person with something subtracted. And who would want to live as a lack?
Yet none of the students were ever deficient in the ways I saw myself. Not because students never shared my traits, but because deficiency was the wrong approach entirely.
Everyone’s work had its own sensory charge. Its own affective pulse, its own cadence of cognition, its own synaesthetic leaps, its own nerves and heartbeat. Each writer’s thoughts had an irreplicable texture that made each person’s voice irreplaceable—that, more importantly, made each person irreplaceable.
There was no one of whom I thought the world would be better if they ceased to write.
However one defines success in poetry, innate talent seems to play little role. The students who went on to write interesting things were, more than anything, simply the students who went on to keep writing.
As a teacher, my work was not to tell a student they had failed. It was to say, come back to this.
As a writer, my work is to come back to this.
*
I have now prodded and abandoned this essay another several dozen times.
What’s surprised me the most about writing is how rarely readers can infer the process behind the final piece. Sometimes a poem will arrive all at once, a starburst of thoughts, half-gift, half-crisis. But the bulk of my poems come as scraps.
This must have just poured out of you, say readers. But my poems rarely pour. My work is stitching, gathering, noticing, polishing, listening, researching, living.
A poem does not have to be a deluge. It can be a way to give shape to the day. To hold different parts of oneself in conversation, and in conversation with the world—with other artworks, other poems, other people, the startle of an insect crossing the page.
The work is to continue. To gather the scraps off my desk and reorganize, absorbed for hours in the pleasure of attention, in the startlement of juxtaposition, in the joy of not knowing how it will end.
How a poem begins: again. Again.
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Madelaine Caritas Longman's poetry collection, The Danger Model (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in PRISM international, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, Room, Grain, and elsewhere. In 2025, she was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature. She lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.
