Jessica Lee McMillan : Pain in the Reverie: What is a good poem and how does it begin?

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

 

 

 

 

Jessica Lee McMillan : The White Light of Tomorrow, by Russell Thornton

The White Light of Tomorrow, Russell Thornton
Harbour Publishing, 2023

 

 

 

Russell Thornton's timeless, lyric poetry is even more emotionally resonant and visually intense in his latest collection, The White Light of Tomorrow. Seeking beginnings in endings on a cyclical journey like Roethke’s "The Far Field," from where this collection draws its title, Thornton continues his poetics of transmuting matter and spirit where: "Light and rock meet, and rock flows like water/ through designs it finds and loses again.(13) Part memoir and part metaphysics, Thornton gives us his characteristically burning, haunted signatures of myth and archetype through the elements, but also through unexpected sources such as a metal sink, an answering machine and a corpse. The collection's long poem, “The Sea Wolf in the Stone" moves from the image of a "ragged man" urinating by a forest highway to scattered needles in a cave in the hills, then takes Blakean leaps from a petroglyph. The lines of the carving expand to "pictures forming in the air" and direct him through water and light back again to the trees and stone. In "The Draftsman's Wound" his father's compass set is likened to a coffin of bones and draws "circle upon circle within itself". These poems teach us lines and circles are not Plutonic forms, nor intellectual exercises, but "a diagram of trance swirls"—desire lines of a passionate, poetic voice.

The most emotionally impactful poems focus on Thornton's troubled relationship with his father who he calls "my absent king". "A Coat" is a particularly devastating narrative where the coat is an "unintentional gift" imbued with his father's DNA, as well as a costume where he "learned earliest how inheritance meant prison stripes". In "My Fathers Beard" the beard doubles as ironwork, as a biblical analog of father and son, as well as "ore transformed...yet leading back again to every beginning in the dark earth."

Thornton grounds us throughout the collection via historical Vancouver sites, including the Balmoral Hotel, The Fraser Arms, and Woolco. As with Thornton's childhood poems in this collection, the Vancouver poems are often more unsettling than nostalgic. They serve as a counterpoint to the sublime digressions responding to Song of Songs, such as Shulamite’s aura in "Description" or the white light of the garment in "Shawl". Like Thornton's previous work, vitality endlessly shifts through matter and through us. But in this collection, there is an even keener sense of how imperfect our lives are; how we are fallible vessels, limited by addiction, class and inescapable mortality.

The White Light of Tomorrow also hones in on temporal themes of aging, the anthropocene and facing death. "Blackouts" is a like a brush with death but with the paradoxical revelation that light has to move through darkness. Similarly striking is the observation that “light is beauty and why we live our life in arrears". Meditations on death feel more contemporary and relevant to our epoch in this collection. "Peter's Ice Cream" and "Summer Morning" take us to the immediacy of climate crisis and "Power" admits in Thornton's alternate, matter-of-fact voice: "I can't help it; I think this is it."

Thornton's world, however, does not mire in endings because of its cyclical motion. His poetic receptiveness to moments of consummation along the circle is present in this collection's refrain of "gathering distances". The white light closes distances. It is the beginning in the end. In poems like "Voice", the world collapses into a superposition where Thornton observes "rain whispering in my wrist". Then the circle widens in poems like "Shoes" observing "a conflagration widened from its point of origin".

Thornton's singular villanelle in the collection, "A Dance", is particularly suited to his syntax, which is like an alchemic equation of energies reassigned to different variables: A is B is C is.... The domestic scene of a lover in a doorway is a burning apparition. In "Play Structure", the playground exists on multiple planes—it "is a molecule of children" where light itself "assigns roles in a numberless cast". Humanity has little autonomy in this metaphysics, which does not succumb to apocalyptic helplessness but rather awe. In The White Light of Tomorrow, autonomy itself is the inferior myth because a thing is more than itself and not itself forever. But despite the "trance swirls", we never get lost because Thornton never abandons the tangible image. And his images relate to each other more like syllogism than complicated metaphor.

In "The Prophecy" Thornton concludes "I see my task must be to wait and fall away/ in the honey of the moment...", suggesting the same poetic attention of the windswept reader. For us, "Story" imparts why we must surrender to the shimmering moments in the counterpoise of light and dark, desire and loss because:

Whatever heaven we dreamt
spends its energy
along with whatever life we ruined,
as high as any riverside
and as low as any riverbed.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessica Lee McMillan is poet, essayist and civil servant with an English MA and Certificate in Creative Writing from The Writer’s Studio (SFU). Her writing has appeared in over 30 publications across Canada and the US, including The Humber Literary Review, Train Poetry Journal, Pinhole Poetry, GAP RIOT Press, Blank Spaces, Rogue Agent Journal and Rose Garden Press (forthcoming). Jessica is completing her first poetry collection. She lives on the unceded traditional territories of Halkomelem-speaking Peoples (New Westminster, BC) with her little family and large dog. More at: jessicaleemcmillan.com.