How does a poem begin?
My students recently bought me an oversized anthurium, proudly telling me their plan to get a "good one". A good one with its organic shape—browning leaves among its glossy, dark foliage—and a singular bloom among several unopened buds. We know a good poem holistically when we read it. It resonates a truth or emotion even when the poem itself is a composite of impressions rendered in fallible language.
Beautifully crafted poems can be terribly safe and mundane—as lifeless as a plant groomed for symmetry. And too many open blooms draw suspicion of diminishing returns. Contemporary poetry has grown increasingly suspicious of device over dialectic. What lets us in the poem may just be its brown leaf in contrast to the shiny ones. A tendril moving out of bounds. A pain in the reverie.
The confounding of language in our Baudrillardian "post-truth" information-overload era makes devotion to aesthetics or any prescriptive approach to poetry disingenuous. Each generation contends with crumbling illusions of stability, but systemic breakdown feels more rapid and with more witnesses. As we ask ourselves what the point of poetry is, a good poem is the attentive lens for our present chaos.
With all this uncertainty, it can be hard not to crave a cosmological constant. Many of my poems look to physics and geology to process existential concerns and human experience. As such, they are moving away from the "I" as the great mover. As scientists theorize dark matter as a cosmological constant—the soil of the universe—so too is the poet's surroundings—a living array. How much more truthful is it than to preserve that sense of dynamic witnessing and on the page?
A nascent poem and a good poem both invite contrast, overlap and interplay. Editors look for poems that elicit a second reading; where subsequent readings differ from the first by virtue of the poem's rich heterogeneity. Poems draw me in when words and syntax slip and morph within and beyond the line, deferring completeness or finality and often resisting dissection by virtue of their internal ecology. A good poem is one that seems true in its language.
In a recent workshop the great Fred Wah said "the sentence is full of things. It does not have to be taken over by notions of completeness". Many poets are weary of the last line providing a false sense of closure. The line—the word, even—is a leaf browning at the margins. A good poem braids life's temporality and perpetuity. A good poem finds the site of interruption.
In the most recent collections I've read, Cecily Nicholson's Crowd Source and Tolu Oloruntoba's Unravel seize language's shifting structures, creating a restless etymology:
when crystals are formed
avalanche layers deposited by storms
precious bonds vary like all of us staring
in infinite gest as structures replicate glitter
-from "XII" in Cecily Nicholson's Crowd Source
Nicholson and Oloruntoba's poems both resonate with powerful images and an enduring atmosphere but the language prevents us from resting anywhere for too long. This is because the poems expose the embeddedness of colonialism in language that makes it unreliable:
...It is revelatory to see whose blood was shed
for worlds past and present, who salvation
was for. Historians know art is political.
See the cameos and guest appearances.
How many annunciations with Easter
eggs in them?...
-from "Come Si Dice?" in Tolu Oloruntoba's Unravel
In a letter from Dylan Thomas to Henry Treece, Thomas explains his poems are hosts of "warring images" and he does not want his poems to be a "circular piece of experience... outside the living stream that is flowing all ways" but rather images that are "reconciled for that small stop of time". After the still life is painted, the flowers perish and the leaves continue reaching to the sun and into time. A good poem allows "the living stream" to move the poem in its time and ensures that form/intention/the lyric I/narration does not block its flow. Thomas asserts "the life must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die in another". For me, when one image from my observed world takes up another, the whole poem starts to beat. I know I have momentum when those images become inextricable. I know it is a good one when the language offers the best lens it can and there are still some brown leaves left to show me I've spoken its truth.
Works
Cited:
Nicholson,
Cecily. Crowd Source. Talonbooks, 2025.
Thomas,
Dylan and Ed. Paul Ferris. Dylan Thomas: Collected Letters, MacMillan
Books, 1985.
Oloruntoba,
Tolu. Unravel. McClelland & Stewart, 2025.
Jessica Lee McMillan (she/her) is a poet and teacher. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and she has an English MA. Recent/forthcoming poems can be read in CV2, The Malahat Review, Crab Creek Review, QWERTY, and Canadian Literature. Jessica lives on the land of the Halkomelem-speaking Peoples (New Westminster, BC) with her little family and large dog. jessicaleemcmillan.com
