A poem begins în suflet, in the soul, sunt sigură. Poi, “da cosa nasce cosa,” as Bruno Munari said. One thing gives birth to the next—a smell, o amintire, a feeling, another beginning…
I’m drawn to François Jacqmin’s idea that “dès que le poème est fait, je me rends compte qu'il y a, à l'intérieur de ce poème qui est terminé, un autre poème qui est à faire”—as soon as the poem is finished, I realize that within this completed poem, there is another poem waiting to be written.
There’s an echo here with Farah Ghafoor’s thought that “the most enjoyable poems begin, I believe, in other poems,” and with Misha Solomon’s sense that “a poem for me is an ending followed by a beginning. There’s a freedom in that reversal: something that’s over before it begins never needs to end.”
So poems begin in poems, which begin in the soul.
But from a practical, pen-on-paper perspective, I’ve had to learn new ways of beginning a poem since becoming a mother. I used to start—or re-start—my writing with long solitary photo-walks, makeshift afternoon desks in the middle of the forest or the city, spontaneous sketching sessions, or workshops with other writers.
Now, I write with my feet while chasing my son. I compose in the quaderno of my mind while breastfeeding him to sleep. I transcribe the day’s thoughts with a voice note to myself at 2:00am in a fit of “revenge bedtime procrastination.”
I begin with frantic lists. I write about not starting any poem. A recent poem of mine is called “De ce n-am scris azi?” (Why didn’t I write today?), a catalogue of everything I did instead. Another poem, “obiceiuri și formule” (habits and formulas), is essentially a checklist of what actually leads me to write and what does not. For instance, after I translate or draw, I almost always want to write; but after I curate or coordinate, I don’t write for weeks.
Even the language I begin to write in has changed. I now write more poems in my mother tongue of Romanian. It’s not my dominant language by far; it’s actually my weakest, but I am trying my best to teach it to my son, so writing helps me.
Beginning to write in Romanian pulls me toward rhyme (a choice contemporary poets in English tend to scorn, for reasons I haven’t yet understood), toward surrealism, and toward the old proverbs that shaped my childhood. I test each line out loud, waiting to see if the rhythm sparks my son’s curious carita de wonder. His laughter is the truest measure I have. A recent brief poem of mine goes: “mama umblă danga-langa / mama umblă teleleu / pe cărări de vis se plimbă / cu gândul zburând mereu.”
This poem is about a mother who wanders aimlessly, roaming through dream paths with her thoughts flying everywhere. I love it because (I realize now) it holds both the writer I was before Rafael—roaming around Edmonton in search of a brief outdoor desk to write or draw at—and the writer I am now, wandering with him through different cities, and through dream paths when I can no longer take my long solitary walks.
Adriana Oniță [photo credit: Shawna Lemay] is a poet, artist, educator, editor, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. She is the author of Descântec For My Split Tongue (Palimpsest Press / Anstruther Books, 2026), Trace Amounts (Agatha Press, 2026), Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). Her multilingual poems also appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, and Tint Journal. As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She is the editorial director at the Griffin Poetry Prize and lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com.
