How does a poem begin?
A few weeks ago, I was on the escalator in the subway on my way home from the library. In front of me there was a woman carrying a potted white lily. Peace lily, I thought, feeling pleased with myself for having remembered this without resorting to Google Lens (a remarkably low bar, I realize, but you’ve got to take what you can get). Glancing over my shoulder, I noticed the person behind me was holding a little white dog, maybe a poodle or bichon frisé. I stood sandwiched between them, feeling the strangeness of the moment, and my lack of a white non-human entity in my arms. Clearly, I hadn’t gotten the memo. I filed the scene away in the “put this in a poem” folder in my brain.
I’ve heard a few writers talk about “glimmers,” those moments or images in a day that stand out to us for no particular reason. But why limit ourselves to collecting the images and scenes we perceive with our senses? Increasingly, I find myself reaching inward, rather than outward, for the language upon which to build a poem. Sometimes, this means drawing on the physical world, but more often than not for me these days, this means imbuing the raw material of the imagination with the emotional flavours and textures of day-to-day living, the blisteringly awkward, bewildering, absurd, heart-wrenching, exuberant experience of being alive at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century.
The poem destabilizes the present moment by demanding my attention and asking me to engage in non-linear, associative logics. The poem starts walking. I walk, sometimes jog, alongside it. My job is to keep up. The act of writing a poem feels like remembering a dream. Sometimes, remembering a dream feels like I’m writing a poem. When I start a new entry in my journal called “Dream notes,” I tend to write in fragments, usually in the present tense. A word, an image. Nighttime. Venetian blinds. A typewriter. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s hybrid poetic memoir Dictée breaks narrative into fragments, refusing the seductive verisimilitude of the prose sentence, in contrast to Renee Gladman, for example, whose virtuosity with the sentence sings worlds into existence. Stitching fragments together can be the start of a poem. So can writing a long, beautiful sentence, building clause upon clause, stretching the grammar and syntax of the sentence over as many lines as you can.
I love to accumulate material in my black hardcover notebooks. Lines from 19th-century children’s books and essays on ecology. Descriptions of visual art. Lists of early memories. Etymologies. Lines from W.S. Merwin. Headlines about Taylor Swift. Oftentimes these are places to begin. They can be epigraphs or the ghosts of future epigraphs that will haunt the poem once they are erased from it. Writing them down by hand is key, encoding them in my muscle memory and my job is, as my MFA thesis advisor Hoa Nguyen taught me, to “metabolize them.” Sometimes they make appearances in various parts of a poem. Sometimes they are points of departure. It is only once the poem has been written that I can decide where it really begins.
Recently, I was editing a poem that appears in my new collection that began with the line, “Dr. Caligari was known for gaslighting icebergs.” Where did this line come from? I did not know when I watched the 1920 German expressionist horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that its protagonist would make a cameo appearance in a poem (all the more reason to absorb as much strange and beautiful art as you can). The poem, as it ended up, had nothing to do with the film, nor icebergs, nor gaslighting. But writing the thought down, as absurd as it was, allowed for tangential thoughts to surface. This eventually led me to the real subject of the poem, which was about my father’s sudden disappearance and the dismissive platitudes that people in the throes of grief are all too often subjected to.
Something about the poem wasn’t working, though. I knew it, and my editor knew it. Finally, I found the true beginning of the poem, about a third of the way down the page. By the true beginning, I mean the place where I suddenly begin to care about the poem, either as a reader or writer, or both. It doesn’t have to be deep and emotional or autobiographical. Just the place where the bottom of the poem drops out from under you and you are in the poem. Not clearing your throat or flexing your writing muscles. Sometimes a little throat clearing is okay. Sometimes that can be the whole poem. But it’s important, as I tell my students (and try to keep in mind for myself) to be intentional. If you’re going to swing from branch to branch, make sure those branches are sturdy. If you want the reader to follow your mind in the act of leaping, make them good leaps.
This is what I love about writing. Following the rabbit holes and passageways that randomness reveals and invites you to explore. I learned from Geoffrey Nutter not to feel any sense of obligation to return to a particular subject. Let it go wherever takes you. Now I am going to break this rule, and tell you that I still haven’t written the poem that starts with standing on an escalator between a poodle and a peace lily. Maybe I never will. Maybe I just did.
Lisa Richter is a poet, writer, and educator. She is the author of two full-length collections, Closer to Where We Began and Nautilus and Bone, whose honours include the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and the Book Publishers Association of Alberta's Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, among other journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Toronto. Her third book, Sublunary, is forthcoming with University of Alberta Press in spring 2026. Find her online at www.lisarichter.org.
