How does a poem begin?
How does a poem begin?
For me, with a feeling. For others, it’s a form of thinking – or being – or some other verbiage. A kind of doing. I don’t know about doing, though, lately. I resist the poem’s doing and I’m more interested in it’s feeling. It’s radar for intimacy. I’ve always been like that, though. I want to be close to the world. I want to curl up inside its rind.
What makes a good poem?
Might as well ask what makes goodness. A good question, for sure, a complicated one too. I’m thinking now of ouroboros, the snake eating itself, when I think of goodness. It’s binary, I’ve resisted all my life. Over and over, we’re told or we’re telling each other to resist goodness, even as we strive for it. It’s an important question in my own work. Danez Smith recently had a great little PSA on Instagram about the importance of a bad poem, how we love to poem before it performs for us whatever deem to be a poem’s goodness – it’s craft – it’s culture – it’s empirical or enterprising ability.
Over and over again, I’ve returned to the idea that a good poem, for me, is a poem that changes me fundamentally. You’re a different person after you’re done reading it, or something in the world is different because of it. The poem that knows you’re going to die, I’ve heard attributed to Solmaz Sharif. The poem that knows how I want to live, I want to say back.
Sanna Wani [photo credit: Hamzah Amin] is a Kashmiri writer, editor, and translator based in Toronto. She is the author of My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi Press, 2022) and Lantern (House of Anansi Press, 2026).
