Em Dial : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

Looking at this question– How does a poem begin?– feels a bit like being trapped in a room with mirrors on opposite walls. I look one way and the question is asking the qualities with which a poem begins and there stand an infinite string of adverbs. A poem begins urgently, gingerly, hauntingly, detachedly, boldly, skeptically. Each adverb stands firm in its purpose. Each is correct.

I look the other way and the question is asking about the possibility of poetry, with an emphasis on the does in the question. The odds are stacked against poetry. And yet, poems begin every day. How? There, in the mirror, are all of the poets who have revealed to me the infinite possibilities: June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Mahmoud Darwish. At the front of that chain are the poets who have been recently martyred in Gaza, like Refaat Alareer and Hiba Abu Nada.

With the impossibility of choosing among these infinite hows, I turn instead to a different question: Where does a poem begin? I know, I know, changing the question is a cop out. But, for me, the where is how you get to the how. The where is a particular point at the intersection of the many planes on which poetry exists.

The first where is where the speaker is. Sometimes, even in the “final draft” (whatever that means), the author and the speaker are both clueless as to where the speaker begins that particular poem. The lack of knowing is, too, a point on the speaker’s plane. It may actually be the most specific where. The speaker’s bedroom or ocean or left fingernail are shifting targets, moving forever towards the reader’s own bedroom or ocean or left fingernail.

The second where is where the author is. The room, home, country, empire within the poem is written are inextricable from the poem beginning.

The third where is where the heart of the poem is. Forgive me for the triteness, but before each poem is a particular breath in, and that particular breath is powered by a particular heartbeat. This is the most critical where which then informs the most critical how– one that answers more directly the second mirror that I posed. It is the where that contributes to a poem’s possibility and how it opens up something in the reader. It is the where that decides which side of history the poem lies upon. It decides how the poem sinks or swims.

 

 

 

 

 

Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, the Permanent Record Anthology from Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. 

rob mclennan : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Em Dial

  

 

 

 

Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, the Permanent Record Anthology from Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. 

Em Dial reads in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 25 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

rob mclennan: I’d first caught a glimpse of your work through the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towardsthe Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025). How did you get involved in that project?

Em Dial: It’s such an honor to be included in this anthology that’s full of writers I admire. I received the call for submissions through a mailing list for Asian diasporic writers, and the project seemed so fitting for some poems I had been working on at the time that were about the legacy of Quadroon Balls in the Antebellum American South. As someone who is entering the world of archival and documentary poetics, I really admire Naima Yael Tokunow’s editorial vision for this collection. 

rm: How does this particular piece fit with the other work you’ve been doing, such as the poems in In the Key of Decay? Structurally, the poem feels quite different from the work in that collection.

ED: The pieces in Permanent Record feel like clicking the magnification on a microscope up by a lens. Where In the Key of Decay is grasping at these big ideas of race, science, and gender and trying to spread them out on the page for examination, my more recent work is more constrained, trying to take a very specific idea and draw out the boundaries around it to better understand it.

rm: Part of what struck about the poems in your debut was the range of formal exploration throughout the collection. Was there a concern at any point about how to make the collection cohere through such variety? And what prompted you to attempt so many directions?

ED: Part of the range is due to the fact that this collection is a compilation of years of work. Over those years I grew more confident as a writer and willing to stray from traditional forms. I think the other reason for the diversity in forms is my intention to make this work one of attempting, of trying, of failing to find an answer. If I were to plod along in couplets for 80 pages, I think I would have felt too direct in my approach to poetic inquiry. In arranging the final manuscript, I did have some anxiety about the formal incoherence, but ultimately it felt like it built towards the intention of the collection and became one of my favorite things about the book. 

rm: I wouldn’t say an incoherence, but certainly an exploration that opens the possibilities of the coherence of In the Key of Decay. Has your sense of the poem, or the manuscript, shifted since the assemblage of this debut collection? Are you still exploring multiple directions through form?

ED: My sense of both has been constantly bouncing around since starting my MFA program last fall. In In the Key of Decay, I thought of both the poem and the manuscript as a whole as an opportunity for charting and sense-making. I think recently I’ve been learning about and utilizing the poem as more of an agent of chaos, of both making and unmaking. What this means for me formally is still to be determined, but I’ve been taking more interest in received forms and the opportunity of letting form come to you rather than seeking it out.

rm: Did you have any difficulty translating more performative elements of your work for the sake of working a printed book? There are moments within the collection I can feel and even hear the performance come through. Were you concerned about how a piece that might work well in performance might sit on the page?

ED: That was a huge concern for some of the pieces in the collection that I had initially written for slam stages. But rethinking how to communicate some of the same energy visually was one of my favorite aspects of developing the book. It felt like working on a sudoku or some other kind of puzzle, trying to fit pieces into their proper spot in relation to one another. I think much of my more recent work has tended toward quiet and reservation, so it was a fun challenge to revisit older work and think about how to preserve their louder integrity. 

rm: I’m fascinated in how your work articulates the complications and collisions of culture, borders, family and history, from external forces to the internal. How easy or difficult was it for you to open these conversations, some of which fall into the deeply personal, through the form of poetry?

ED: It has felt like poetry is the only way. I think I have felt and witnessed these collisions at global and personal scales for all of my adult life, and became deeply obsessed and troubled by them. Poetry became the only lens that allowed me to zoom from the large to the small and back, and similarly from the individual to the universal. I can be quite reserved in day to day life, but strangely, I seldom feel hesitant to implicate the details of my own life in the context of the issues I discuss. It feels like the only way.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. His latest title is Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller (2022). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.