How does a poem begin?
How does a poem begin?
Not
like an opera, that’s for certain.
I’m writing from Montreal, where for the next two weeks I’m participating in the Opera Creation Forum, an intensive workshop run by Musique Trois Femmes. I’m here to collaborate with a group of composers, singers, and musicians — and I’m here to learn how to write librettos.
As a poet (or more precisely, as someone who’s previously written for poetry, comics, screen, but not for opera), my most challenging learning curve here is discovering exactly which of my poetic techniques and practices translate — or do not translate — into this new medium.
As
I’m learning, I am of course keeping my ears open for tools and concepts from
opera may be of interest to us as poets.
On Wednesday, for example, I listened as the singers and composers outlined how they approach the classical modes of Recitative and Aria in contemporary opera.
In the Recitative, the character’s song sets up information — it may advance the plot, for example, or define their relationships or status quo. Conversely, in the Aria, the song expands emotionally, as the composer’s work and the singer’s performance express the character’s emotion.
Put another way, the Recitative must enact a situation, while the Aria enacts a transformation.
As they teach us to compose text for these complimentary operatic modes, our M3F mentors Kristin Hoff and Luna Pearl Woolf explained how the Recitative is typified by compressed time and sparse orchestration, so that listeners can focus on the words; the Recitative is therefore more likely to occur in the singer’s most comfortable, most intelligible vocal range. By contrast, the Aria is typified by expanded time and dense orchestration, inviting more focus on the music; here, the composer will likely expand single words and syllables into melismatic phrases and explore the singer’s wider, more expressive, and less verbally intelligible vocal range.
Therefore, (and while there are notable exceptions and grey areas to this rule) it is conventional for an operatic scene to begin wth the Recitative before moving on the the Aria; the overall opera then continues in an aesthetic alternation or variation between these modes as the narrative progresses.
So as I’m sitting down to grapple with rob mclennan’s question, “How does a poem begin?,” I’m thinking about how we poets might adopt a librettist’s vocabulary as a window into our poetic beliefs and practices.
For example, when I reflect on my recent work in poetry, I’m aware that I’ve developed a particular proclivity to rely on long, descriptive titles as a kind of “recitative” shorthand — as if I want to get the setting, the background, the context conveniently out of the way before my poem, my lyric performance, can really begin.
To avoid confusion, I acknowledge I’m using the word “lyric” throughout this essay, but I also acknowledge that this can be a tricky or even contentious term to define. For the sake of brevity, Iet’s say that I’m making some fairly conventional assumptions about what a “lyric” poem even is. We can assume that it’s a text about an “I,” a lyric subject or speaker, making a short, first-person utterance. Lyrics can generally assumed to be short — but of course if we’re looking for it, we can start to see lyric everywhere (dramatic monologues, arias, narrative asides in epic poems, Silver Age superhero comics…. even [and I only bring this up as a curiosity because it’s the subject of my PhD dissertation!] the “lyrical” performance of athletes’ bodies across physical fields, lines, and structures). Let’s also say that the “lyric” mode assumes an audience who either overhears this utterance (like an eavesdropper overhearing, or an imagined amphitheatre full of listeners concealed behind a fourth wall). We can assume that lyric includes confessional affect, creating the illusion of immediacy, intimacy, and authenticity; but we can also assume a dramatic tension between the appearance of authenticity and the highly artificial forms and conventions of any given lyric poem. Whether we’re thinking about poetry from antiquity or the 21st century, I posit that we can also assume lyric is a kind of physical exchange between physical bodies: the real poet’s, the imagined speaker’s, the very real eyes-mouth-lungs-hands of the reader, the place-body-situation-structure of the text itself. (Using the opera again as a metaphor, I think it’s interesting to ponder exactly who “composes” or “performs” the “score” of a lyric poem, and how these designations and assignments must always become delightfully, productively muddy.)
Anyway. From my beginner’s perspective at the OCF, I’m wondering at how opera’s protagonists typically step on stage in their first scenes and say, quite simply and powerfully, Here’s who I am, here’s where I am and what’s happening here and I have to say about it.
A stark contrast. Contemporary librettists seem to write their recitatives practically, straightforwardly and unashamedly. But for contemporary poets, such moves often feel outlandishly clumsy, pre-modern. Basic, in every sense of the word.
And, from this operatic outsider’s perspective, I think I can most accurately describe my own poetic discomfort with exposition, introduction, and scene-setting as necessary moves at the beginning of a lyric poem. My embarrassment, really.
In her book Lyric Shame, Gillian White identifies lyric embarrassment as a defining feature of contemporary poetry. I love this book because it challenges us to name this shame we all feel, maybe even embrace it as a fundamental and motivating impulse in our art form.
Meanwhile, mid-Opera Creation Forum, I’m having fun playing with rhyming couplets and unironic outpourings of emotion — I’m talking to composers, and trying to articulate why most of us would be literally ashamed to do that in our poetry.
This fascinating contrast between poetic and operatic lyric is, of course, largely due these two media’s differing relationships to narrative. Lyric is (typically) short, with some narrative elements, while narrative is one of the primary considerations in full-length operas — perhaps second only to the music itself.
I feel like whenever I think about how to begin a poem, I’m balancing the basic narrative requirements of the lyric mode (efficiently establishing who might be speaking, maybe when, maybe where, maybe why) with my “lyric shame.”
During my MFA program, I had the valuable opportunity to study with poets like Martin Nakell and Douglas Messerli, representatives of a decidedly anti-lyrical lyric tradition; these are genuine “language poets” who challenged us students to experiment with interrogating, disrupting, and often eliminating “the narrative” from our work altogether. Like many of my teachers and mentors over the years, I think I still often hear their voices in my head when I’m writing and revising; while I don’t feel my work belongs to their avowedly avant-garde tradition, I still feel them pulling at me, provoking me towards anti-narrative options, impulses. And I’m always grateful for the results.
By contrast, almost ten years later, I’m composing a collection of (sometimes overtly narrative) lyric poems about sports and athletes; my PhD supervisor at UNB, Sue Sinclair, is inspiring me to embrace an entirely opposite mode. Lately, as I’m revising the collection, I feel her talking in my head too, waxing anti-anti-lyrical, teaching me to be shameless. Sue has her own language for the “recitative” moves that help a poem begin; she’ll sometimes point out to me what poets do at the beginnings of the poem to “invite the reader in.”
And so I’m wondering. Why we shouldn’t just be generous? Why not be good hosts, as Sue would put it, and simply invite the reader in as clearly and generously as we can? Why not be more like librettists?
As for me, I’ve decided to use my OCF experience as inspiration to approach, as practically as I can, and without shame, the following reframing of “how does a poem begin?”:
What we have to say before we can really sing?
Personally, I used to suffer from a genuine embarrassment about saying before singing — a recitative shame that I think has significantly shaped the structure and framing of virtually all my recent work.
A couple of years ago, I got really into epigraphs, and you can read a bunch of them in my 2024 chapbook More (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2024). In the poem “More elections,” I felt like I had to clarify exactly what and where and when it was about before I got started; in “More dragons” I felt like I had to give you the two lines of Shakespeare I was referencing before I could start.
I guess I used to be embarrassed about the possibility of sounding like Jonathan Swift writing to Stella WHO COLLECTED AND TRANSCRIBED HIS POEMS or VISITING ME IN MY SICKNESS, or whatever. But why is that embarrassing? It’s not embarrassing to whip out an all-timer like James Wright’s "In Memory of the Horse David, Who Ate One of My Poems,” or something nicely plainspoken like Howard Nemerov’s “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry,” or a wild title for a wild poem like Francine J. Harris’ "Katherine with the lazy eye. Short. And not a good poet." Why is any of this embarrassing?
Speaking of epigraphs, I should mention that I write (and have always written) a lot of “after” poems, so I have a lot of “after” epigraphs. These don’t embarrass me as much. I consider the “after” a kind of recitative move, too: factual info, not just an artistic lineage or acknowledgement, but a rhetorical move, a rhetorical situation. I’m saying, This is who I’m speaking after — after, yes, but also really to. With, I hope. I hope. I like for much more than after, particularly when we’re writing after departed poets, our lyric ancestors.
That kind of beginning — the lyric after — is something I’ve felt a real calling to do since the very first time I wanted to write a poem:
Write for and with a text — a person — and say, You’re not gone, I’m still with you, I’m keeping your voice in my head, your words in my mouth.
I’m really thrilled about my upcoming collection Nebulas (Coach House 2025). In contrast to the short, compact lyrics I’ve written in the past, I’m trying out a more expansive, reaching aesthetic, something I hope suits the collection’s cosmic subject matter. The titles in the collection are all extremely, luxuriously long — occasionally longer than the poems themselves. (And there are a lot of “after” poems in them, but now I know better, they’re now explicitly “for.”) I think the whole book is really my attempt to embrace my old recitative embarrassment — embrace the (literally) infinite and universal contexts of my lyric texts-as-constellations.
And so I’m asking myself again. Why should I be embarrassed about how and where and when my poems begin? Why do I feel like I always have to ask for anyone’s forgiveness for reaching out towards something — usually someone?
Anyway.
I’m not sure how (or if) this lyric context will help me figure out the actual lyrics of my first librettos. But I’m offering you — rob and his community of readers and writers — this operatic language as a possible way of expressing and processing how we begin our poems. And I have to admit, at the OCF, I’m kind of enjoying dramatizing my own “lyric” shame — my titles and epigraphs, my embarrassment, my afters.
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Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books 2023) and Nebulas (forthcoming 2025), as well as four poetry chapbooks: What I Meant to Ask, Things to Buy in New Brunswick, More, and The Bones and Eggs and Beets. She also co-created the graphic novel One More Year. She is a PhD candidate at UNB and currently lives in North Vancouver.
