How does a poem begin?
Beginnings are fluid, and poems have multiple start points—subjects, geographies, emotions, texts, events. The poems I write often intersect with my reading or research. For example, “Here at the Mouth”—a sequence focused on colonial shipping history in Vancouver—emerged from archival clippings and books, but began when I took a walk in a local park just as a television crew was setting up. Seeing the strange juxtaposition of piles of trees and large fake bushes laid on top of real foliage caught my attention, ignited an impulse to represent it in language. (How would a cognitive scientist answer this question?) Lines that eventually became a poem called “Holdfast” first registered while on an oceanside hike amid weeks of reading about kelp forests. Perhaps juxtaposition, and/or motion, are methods for beginning. Other recent work “began” while scanning parallel lists of words generated through procedural sampling, a smaller, page-based move.
Below, I represent what I understand to be the experience of beginning to write a poem. Here, I’m interested in the moments when phrases or lines begin coming to mind, the process of setting down first words then more words. In Betsy Warland’s formulation, I’m thinking about inscription, not composition. Often there is disorientation or an unexpected turn; sometimes, a steady motion towards. Inhabiting or tolerating uncertainty is involved. So are tangents, accidents, and the unfamiliar. In one of the entries in Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers titled “How will you begin?” she writes, “Flying from Heathrow to JFK, I see below, an unknown arctic landscape of black mountains and white rivers” (24). The line—the vantage point, topography—signals the initial locating or perceptive moment, and links beginning to registering the unknown. I find the experience of beginning to write a poem also akin to the experience of beginning to read a poem. Often there is disorientation or an unexpected turn; sometimes, a steady motion towards.
How does a poem begin?:
: backwards, flying up the tracks, rain crawling rivulets across windows
It’s like this: boarded and chose the ocean-side aisle of a train, window seat, stared at the brick station then shot backwards: physical sensation of moving in reverse through space.
Miscalculated or sense of direction shot—shot through with bramble, porches, retaining walls, not the ocean view—going the opposite direction on the opposite side, the place adjacent to the place you thought you were: begin here.
A body in motion, careening past banks of birch and blackberry, ivy barbed wire, pallets—“Are we going backwards?” others murmur in the intimate public car—turned-over canoes, deflated trampoline. How does a poem begin?
Walking down the jostling car, hands touching every head rest for balance, doors between cars slide open, jagged streams of water hit the vestibule floor. “There’s a leak in the roof!” someone calls, pulls napkins from a supply shelf and stuffs them between ceiling and overhead rack to absorb drips from a seam; “this is a real 5-star train.”
Slowly, or in a rush, words and phrases accumulate at different angles. Fields of pools of marshy water, twenty herons fishing in stillness, unflinching, as mergansers and buffleheads arc and zag away from the rumble. It’s like that.
Now what do you notice? Words propel parallel, diagonal. A poem begins inchoately, comes in thinking one direction and then orients, reorients.
Brook Houglum has published two chapbooks, Anthronoise (2024) and Inventory (2025), with above/ground press. Her poem “Rewilding” was recently selected for the Best Canadian Poetry 2027 anthology. She teaches at Capilano University and lives with her family in Vancouver on unceded land of the Skwxwú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəỷəm, and SəỈílwətaʔ Nations.
