How does a poem begin?
Perhaps a poem begins when the past stops agreeing with what we remember about it.
Most of my poems begin there: with a memory, an encounter, something I witnessed, something I didn’t fully understand when it happened, or something I have not completely accepted or made peace with. I return to it years later and discover that what I remember and what I now understand are not necessarily the same thing.
I have learned not to ask too quickly what it means.
Perhaps this is because I spent years working in journalism and communications, where language is expected to tell you what it means. Clarity matters. You answer the questions a reader is likely to have and try not to leave too much room for misunderstanding.
Poetry asks something different of me. A poem often begins precisely where my ability to explain something ends.
I grew up with other kinds of language, too. Before journalism, there was the language of the Catholic Church. I spent thirteen years in priestly formation, where words were repeated until they became ritual: prayers, responses, scripture, the language of consecration. Long before I understood repetition as a poetic device, I understood its power as prayer.
And before all of these, there was Tagalog.
I write primarily in English now, but I don’t think I write only from English. Somewhere underneath a poem are the languages that formed me. Sometimes a Tagalog word enters because English cannot do what I need it to do. Sometimes English itself feels slightly strange in my mouth, and I have come to think that strangeness can be useful.
I saw these impulses come together while writing Eating Rice, On Our Feet, my first poetry collection. Many of its poems grew from experiences I had carried for years without fully reckoning with them.
As a journalist in Edmonton and Calgary, I reported on temporary foreign workers living in crowded houses, sometimes thirteen people sharing four bedrooms. I understood the conditions as a reporter: overcrowding, health and safety, the precarious circumstances of migrant workers. But I also came from the Philippines, where several generations and extended family sharing a home can be perfectly acceptable. Years later, when my own brother came to Canada and experienced similar living conditions, what I had once encountered as someone else’s story became painfully close to my own.
That contradiction stayed with me.
This is often where a poem begins for me: not because I have resolved a contradiction, but because I haven’t. Poetry gives me somewhere to put two things that appear unable to occupy the same space and ask them to remain there together.
This may be why ordinary things recur throughout Eating Rice, On Our Feet: rice, pots, spoons, hands, mouths, meals. They are attached to experiences, and those experiences change when examined. Rice can become hunger, migration or the wish to belong. Cooking can be labour and love at once. Feeding someone can be tenderness, obligation, survival, even resistance.
I am less interested in deciding beforehand what these images mean than in discovering what happens when I stay with them. If I already know exactly what the rice means, I probably have an essay, not yet a poem.
The poem has to surprise me.
For a long time, I thought revision meant making a poem clearer. I still value clarity, but I am learning that revision can also mean allowing a poem to remain unresolved. Sometimes the stronger choice is not another explanation but an image. Not another sentence but a break. Not another word but white space.
Perhaps this is also what makes a good poem for me. I want it to risk something. I want to encounter something I recognize and then discover that I have never quite seen it that way.
Maybe a good poem does not reconcile us with the past. Maybe it does something more difficult: it asks us to return to what we thought we knew and remain there long enough for certainty to give way.
The experiences that begin my poems are often ones I have carried for years. I used to think I returned to them because I wanted to understand them.
Now I think I return because they are still capable of changing me.
And perhaps that is where the next poem begins.
Renato Gandia is a Filipino-Canadian writer whose work explores migration, memory, faith belonging, and queer identity. He is the winner of the 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for poetry presented by Writers’ Trust of Canada, and his work has appeared in literary publications and anthologies in Canada and abroad. He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Eating Rice, On Our Feet (Frontenac House, 2027) and memoir Unpriesting (Freehand Books, 2027). He is the managing editor of Salingpusa and acquisitions editor of Constellations of Becoming: Queer Futures and Other Worlds. He lives in Calgary and writes about the stories we inherit, the selves we abandon, and the people who teach us how to begin again.
