Qurat Dar : What makes a good poem

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

How does a poem begin?

I was going to say a poem really begins when the poet begins because every poem pulls from the sum of our life’s experiences, from the lens we have developed to see the world, and so on, but it felt both generic and unhelpful.

So. To be less obnoxious about it, I think the literal beginning of a poem for me is generally some small friction, an observation or image or concept or feeling that sticks out. When I’ve started collecting enough of them in my Notes app and/or notebook that orbit each other there’s a feeling kind of like having a loose tooth, the seed of a poem lurking in the back of my mind. I’ll worry it every now and again, try to feel its shape, its give.

Eventually once it feels like the concept of the poem has reached a critical mass I’ll sit down and take a crack at it. Once in a while (rarer than I’d like) the poem will rush out all at once. More often I have to sit with the different pieces I’ve gathered, arrange them, find how they connect.  Sometimes I’ll only get partway through the poem and have to wait until I’ve gathered more threads to tie into the poem, revisit it until it reaches some semblance of completeness.

What makes a good poem?

I have to resist the urge to sound like a vague and somewhat unreasonable call for submissions here. Yeah it’s pretty great when a poem throws all the windows open, sings to the marrow, sets fire to the mountain, etc. etc. but I think a poem can still be “good” without being the kind of poem that’s once-in-a-lifetime. By “good,” I mean, in my completely subjective and extremely biased opinion, a poem that is compelling, that draws you in, that moves you in some way.

I think, to be boring and straightforward about it, a good poem has something to say and has found the right way to say it. A poem whose content feels seamless with the choice of poetic elements such as form, structure, metaphor, language, and sound. By “seamless” I don’t mean obvious or predictable, rather that the poem’s central tension and the poem’s building blocks complement and heighten each other, sharpen the poem, bring it into relief.

I think a good poem finds a balance of frills and honesty. I love a little self-indulgent twirling as much as the next poet, but too much and the poem feels like a cotton candy void. Too little and it feels like reading a report instead of a poem. Then there is what is said and what is left unsaid, if the poet gives the reader enough substance to grip the poem while leaving enough space for them to find themselves in the poem or to consider multiple layers of meaning, multiple paths through the poem.   

There’s more criteria, of course, like if the poem feels fresh or inventive, if it challenges the reader, its timeliness. But this cohesion and balance are what I find to be the foundation of a good poem. 

 

 

 

 

Qurat Dar is the author of Non-Prophet (Goose Lane Editions 2025), winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She was the City of Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021-2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam National Champion. Qurat’s poems have appeared in Augur, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, and across the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) network.

Process Note #73 : Carolyn Miller

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Carolyn Miller are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

The original manuscript for Random Universe (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2026) was made up of poems taken from my Uncollected Poems folder, several of which had been published but had never seemed to fit into any other manuscript because they were too weird, or too long, and/or too not-serious compared with the poems in my other books. Several of them were mistranslations, poems written while “translating” from poems in a language that I have no knowledge of: Swedish, Russian, Polish, Egyptian hieroglyphics. The title of the manuscript itself is taken from “At Large in the Random Universe,” a poem that I’m sure is a mistranslation though I have long forgotten what poem it was based on.

I put this first version of the manuscript together years ago, then sent it out to various poetry contests with no encouraging results. (In the meantime, I put together a newer manuscript of newer work, which I am now sending around with the same lack of results.) Once I decided to submit the manuscript to Sixteen Rivers Press, a Northern California poetry collective to which I belong, I redid the manuscript, dividing it into three parts and adding new poems.

As I did with my first three books, I organized the manuscript for Random Universe by the time-honored method placing the poems on the floor in rows, then moving them around to follow some kind of intuitive order. Unlike my earlier books, this one was not organized chronologically and made up mostly of poems about Missouri, where I grew up, and poems about California, where I have lived for many years. Random Universe begins with a poem about the ascension of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the village of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Although I am not religious, I am a fan of this Virgin and her combined Christian and pagan iconography, and something about the idea of ascending seemed a good way to begin this manuscript. After this first poem, the next one is about the angels in William Blake’s garden, and the rest seemed to follow from that one in a kind of order by being in relation to the preceding poem and leading in either subject or tone to the following poem. While there is no real narrative arc, for there is no real narrative, I like to think that the poems do take the reader on a kind of journey of widely varying experiences and states of mind. There are many different subjects and settings here, but all of them take place in an expanding physical and mental universe, and the book ends with a kind of logical illogic, with poems of apotheosis, ecstasy, and fire.   

I have been writing poetry for a long time now, starting in grade school and continuing through high school and college, with a hiatus of eight years while I was married. After moving to San Francisco in 1970 as a single mother with two young children, it took me several years to find my feet and start publishing in little zines (including Comet, published by Maw Shein Win!). But I date my becoming a poet to the first Napa Valley Poetry Conference in 1981, where I studied with Robert Hass in a faculty that included Carolyn Kizer, Carolyn Forché, Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart, and Galway Kinnell. It was there that I found my tribe, the poetry community, making friendships with poets that continue to this day and joining with Jeanne Lohmann, another poet attending the conference, to form a writing group in San Francisco. (Later, my tribe expanded to include visual artists, including students of the artist Leigh Hyams, with whom I studied for many years).

That writing group started in 1981 continues today, though I am the only original member. Originally, we met in person twice a month, but these days we meet once a month on Zoom, and four times a year in person for an all-day generative-writing workshop. The poetry collective Sixteen Rivers Press, which has published three of my books, including Random Universe, grew out of this writing group in 1999. It has been a seemingly random poetic journey in which I have had the great good luck to live my life as a poet and painter on this Earth.

 

Día de la Asunción, San Miguel de Allende

She leaves in the middle of August when
squash and their blossoms are sold in the streets,
and in the mercado, pomegranates are opened
and divided into stars. She rises over
the excrement of dogs on the sidewalks
and rain funneled into the trough of the narrow
brown stream. She is lifted above the flat
rooftops studded with gas tanks and hung
with laundry. She ascends with the smoke clouds
of fireworks and the fragrance of corn
cooking over charcoal, leaving
behind her curious story: the stranger
with blue and scarlet wings, the night
journey through the desert, the child
mysteriously given and mysteriously taken
away. See how she floats slowly up
through the bell-shaken air, our Mother,
carrying roses. Soon she will rise
over rings of volcanoes and fields
of banana trees and the sea lumpy
with whales. Already, the hem of her blue
robe is hard to make out against
the shocking blue sky. Now all we can see
are the soles of her small, sandaled feet,
shedding the clay-colored dust of the earth.

At Large in the Random Universe 

The fat, silver, libidinous tuba took wing
in a purple purgatory, where the far-reaching clouds
were clabbered, and a terrible, gelid nimbus
like a halo of strawberry Jell-O surrounded the sun.
Meanwhile, a poky bunny was trying to cross the freeway
and ribbeting frogs were enduring wedding bells;
the geese and goldfish ate as much as they could, hoping
for more, and in the darkness of Paris, a hail of stamens
fell over the gelatos and espressos and café mochas
to swim in the chocolate glaze of small cakes
and slowly sink in the florid teacups. 

Then the half-naked dandelions began to dance,
without shoes or camisoles or crinolines, wearing only
their golden taffeta skirts and their peppery perfume,
while the irises sighed like royalty, the bougainvillea
trembled in its phantom paradise, and azaleas
floated in the sexy grandmother’s curly hair. 

Somewhere a tiger is slinking westward,
waiting to run, as the snowy owl waits in his turret for
the forgetful mouse in the straw. I remember caresses,
fidgeting fingers, that peculiar time on the rug, the mask—
but I would rather forget the tapestries we chose,
the dross that intensifies and turns to ashes,
the mumbling of blond, embittered Hamlet. 

Yet still I hear the waterwheel, the slapping
and coughing and snarling of the flux
we dwell in, in this grungy theater damned by degrees
and cracked like Spode, this college of disease
where we are leashed to process, though we would rather
shatter our glasses like gypsies and sashay through the trash. 

Instead we are twisted like Gumby, riveted by
unsettling leeches, those bloodsuckers that hurt us
like scissors or table saws, that torture us
with tongs and chopsticks until our eyeballs burst like pods.
While I want only to wear lace and a choker of pearls
and to eat Bayonne ham on a doily, forgetting
the icepicks, gulping my bread, deaf to the world
and its crowded cornucopia.

 

Aria
 

Nothing is so beautiful as the ground
of being. And though the possible too
is beautiful, for it is the engine of desire, nothing
is so beautiful as the real, like unexpected flowers
on the doorstep: fragrant, fragile, marked for death,
unfolding moment by moment, lighting the room,
lingering in the mind long after they have faded. 

The lushness of meaning rose to its height in summer,
festooned with lilies and snapdragons, bouqueted
with leaves and the tiny white flowers
that turn into beggar’s lice. I picked bunch after
bunch and brought them back for my mother’s dining
table, where they dropped showers of petals and stamens
and pistils, leaf hairs and insects and pollen, seed
pods and leaves, dirt and dust and drops of sap. 

The green paths of the world keep calling, edged with poison
oak and wild asparagus, crumbled with broken rock
and trampled herbs. So time extends. The past grows deep
and rich; the future moves toward me, cruel and bounteous,
like the sea.

 

Les Choses

Close attention to things may make them seem strange.
—Jean Follain, from A World Rich in Anniversaries

 

Things may be larger than they appear. They may be more mottled, more distorted. They may be ungainly, or they may be supreme fulfillments of their ideal form. Some things may be hidden. Some may travel back and forth between the conscious and unconscious realms. Some may take a metaphoric leap; others, like grasshoppers or frogs, may take real leaps. Sometimes you may think that your life is sad and empty, yet at the same time crowded with unwanted and unneeded objects. Yet if you awake in the middle of the night, thinking about death or about how difficult living is, you may be comforted to be surrounded by them. Your paintings and your books and furniture, your adored cups and plates, the small keepsakes that were given to you or that once belonged to a loved one—even your kitchen appliances—all the things that you will someday leave behind are faithfully existing for you now; they are breathing quietly in and out in unison, keeping watch over you in the night.

 

 

Carolyn Miller lives in San Francisco, where she writes, paints, and works as a freelance book editor. Her books of poetry are Random Universe (2026), Light, Moving (2009); and After Cocteau (2002) from Sixteen Rivers Press; Route 66 and Its Sorrows (2017) from Terrapin Books; and four limited-edition letterpress chapbooks from Protean Press. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac and have appeared in Smartish Pace, SALT, ONE ART, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems: American Places. Her honors include the James Boatwright III Award for Poetry from Shenandoah and the Rainmaker Award from Zone 3.

 

 

 

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com

 

Emily Shafer : I found looking: from Poetry on the Porch

 

 

 

 

On June 1, 2025, after receiving an unexpected invitation to Jennifer Firestone’s Poetry on the Porch reading, I made the trek out to Midwood from Manhattan with my partner Jessica—whom I often drag to readings, despite her general disinterest toward poetry that’s not mine—to hear Eileen Myles and Charles Bernstein read. We arrived early, sat on chairs positioned in the grass before a beautiful blue house. Strangers walked behind us on the sidewalk, looking over, curious about what the event was.

I settled in, observing the crowd gathering. I spotted Eileen and a family friend and now poet friend of mine, Michael Ruby, getting food at the hors d'oeuvre table. Too shy to go up to them, even though I’d spoken with them many times before, I took in the surroundings, a tree-lined street with massive houses (in New York City!)—ours, blue with white trim, a wraparound porch supported by gorgeous white columns atop a wide white and brown staircase. On the porch, a few seats, some books for sale, a bench swing, a lone mic centered above the stairs, and tons of people I’d never seen before.

I saw one of my professors from Brooklyn College, Mónica de la Torre, arrive. —What are you doing here? —What are you doing here? —Eileen invited me, I ran into them at the Poetry Project a couple of weeks ago. Mónica proceeded to run around, say hi to friends and colleagues and grab food. After a few minutes, Jennifer took the stage, asking everyone to sit and prepare for the reading. At that moment I saw Michael again, said hi, that we would talk after. Quickly, he showed me his new book, Sounds of Summer in the Country. In it, a poem titled “A Cricket”—a page full of “ti”s and asterisks indicating cricket noises and pauses. That was the whole poem. We laughed. I thought it was genius. I didn’t know you could do that.

Eileen read first, reading a long poem for the recently passed Alice Notley, shedding pages from their stack onto the floor as they read. The audience was in awe. While Eileen read, an unknown (to me) toddler kept approaching them with snacks that he had taken from the hors d'oeuvre table that they were definitely not going to eat—they probably fell on the floor or were in his mouth before he handed them over. The audience laughed.

Before the reading, Eileen mentioned that a hat was going around the audience for babysitting money for their new dog, Charlie, that they wouldn’t have been able to come if they hadn’t got a sitter, that it cost $40. I had two dollars in my backpack that I found on the ground a few days earlier. I put them in the hat.

After Eileen, Lila Zemborain read in Spanish, with her son Lorenzo Bueno translating her work into English. Charles read third, commanding the stage as usual. I wondered what it would be like to be invited to read among poets such as Eileen, Charles, Lila, surrounded by an audience of poets who are close friends.

Following, Jennifer mentioned that there was a film and artwork by artist Astrid Dick inside. After chatting outside for a few minutes, everyone made their way inside to a long table in the entryway holding Astrid’s zines and paintings. We listened to her tell us about them, and eventually make her way over to the projector in front of the bay window in the living room, where we watched her experimental piece including sound and text. She talked about it after, before dismissing the audience. On my way out, I took a zine from the table. I thought it was genius. I hope to make zines one day. I hope to make art films one day.

Once outside, I ran back into Mónica and Michael. Mónica introduced me to Lila and Michael introduced me to his friend, the Executive Director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Sean Munro. We chatted for a bit: —How is your program? —What are you doing in New York? —Will you come to the New Orleans Poetry Festival? —Here have my card. —We’re best friends, Sean is staying with me for a week. I felt a strong connection to the New York City poetry scene, then. I felt as if I were a part of it.

Throughout the day, I took notes in the Notes app on my phone. I wrote the poem I found looking from my notes shortly after. It didn’t take long and hasn’t been edited much since. In the poem, you can find Mónica (her), Sean, Michael (you), Charlie the dog, the unknown child giving Eileen snacks, Astrid’s (art maga)zine, as well as my longing to be a successful poet like Sean, Mónica, Michael, Eileen, Lila, Charles. I was an observer during that event, but also, by being there, was becoming part of something.

 

 

 

 

Emily Shafer is an incoming MFA candidate in Image Text at Cornell University, holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Brooklyn College, and teaches first-year writing at CUNY. She is the author of it’s too early for poetry (Proper Tales Press), I found looking (above/ground press), and publications in poets.org, The Brooklyn Review, periodicities, and more. Born and raised in Rochester, N.Y., she lives and works in New York City. @emilyshaferwrites / www.emilyshaferwrites.com