How does a poem begin?
I do not know how a poem begins, only that it does . . .and if I’m very lucky, in my own work, at some point I recognize this. Some poems write themselves almost in absentia in the notes app on my phone, where I keep a miscellanea of odd words, overheard conversations, fleeting thoughts, and fragmented images, that for me, in whatever moment, I found—and continue to find—striking. Intuition, my inner assessor, thematically roughly groups these fragments, and often, it turns out, they (or I) are trying to say something. A good poetry workshop also for me will often very quickly produce the guts of a poem.
Some of my poems are troublesome, born from a complexity that is unknowable—to me at least—but insists, insists that it be reckoned with. These are the most difficult poems to wrestle with. The ones where every word feels clunky, every line break ill placed. Half finished, they languish in digital folders and on scraps of paper. Forgotten, they ferment. Re-found . . . perhaps I’ll add another word or two (usually ill advised). Perhaps I’ll erase a phrase (usually to the good). Poems like this take months, even years, to evolve into something I consider “finished.” I usually have a couple of these percolating in the background at any given time—I do like to honour the slow-time aspects of creation, because creativity is a completely different animal than productivity!
The most fun poems for me of course are those where inspiration strikes suddenly, when the fingers and pen can move barely fast enough to capture the words. These usually require little editing, or at least I find it best to not mess with these ones too much—a single misplaced move, and a fragile ecosystem of words can irretrievably collapse. There is multiplicity to consider, always. This word may not be perfect, but is it doing the good work of holding the other ones up? That word may disrupt the cadence . . . but does it lead you towards another one more compelling?
Perhaps what makes a good poem to read is not the same thing that makes a poem good to write. For me, good poems are imperfect—when crafted too meticulously, they tend to glide across my eyes and slide too quickly across my brain. I can appreciate them, but they do not settle in my marrow. They do not pierce to the quick. I like poems with surprises, jagged edges, off rhythms and rhymes. A thought that lands just ahead or behind the beat. An image imperfectly captured but arresting. An idea or emotion that rises to the surface but does not breach.
For me, mystery is an important thing to preserve—the unknowable-ness of things—which is perhaps why I am drawn irresistibly towards poetry, even when it is imperfect or challenging to engage with. In our increasingly digital lives, I sense something happening; I think of it as The Great Flattening. Images are saturated, bright lights shine everywhere, flaws exist only to be repaired or erased, and words are recycled by machines until they lose the meaning that made them words in the first place. In this brightly lit, saturated, compressed world, stumbling doggedly over distance towards some uneven, hidden thing for a fleeting moment that might either shine or slip through our fingers, now seems more necessary than ever.
Jennifer May Newhook’s first full-length poetry collection, Last Hours, was released in 2024 by Riddle Fence Press, and she is currently working on the last, last draft of her first novel The Gulch, some flash fiction, new poems, and a collection of short stories. She has new work coming in the summer issue of The Dalhousie Review.
