Misha Solomon : How Does a Poem Begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

 

A poem, for me, does not so much begin as end. Once I start writing, the poem is over. Nothing feels more like a poem than the moment before the poem exists, the point of no return during which I know something will be produced, that I will produce something.

That's a lie, of course. Nothing feels more like a poem than a poem, on the page or on the screen. But it's also true, in that my culturally mediated understanding of "what a poem is" is entirely constructed around poetry's artful fluidity, or gaseousness, and these stages of the cycle seem to disappear when a poem condenses into being.

I'm usually more practical than this — let's try again. A poem begins when I come up with a title for it. I like to do things in order, and so, almost always, the title comes first. That means, however, that I must already have a clear idea of what's going to follow the title, which means the poem has already begun before the title exists. The poem begins in my mind. That's boring.

And dishonest. I often write in response to prompts, and so the poem begins when whoever thought up the prompt (sometimes that's me) thought it up. So, the poem begins in someone else's mind, except sometimes that someone else is simply me.

Here are some poems I want to write: about feeling like a magpie (shiny things, mirror test, brood parasitism); about Harlow's wire-mother/cloth-mother tests in re: the stuffed "mother" dog my dog likes to hump; about how self-awareness circles back around to its opposite; about those few months in 2015, the promiscuous ones. Have these poems begun?

Now they have:
"Passing the Mirror Test"
"He's Fucking His Mother Again"
"No, Myself"
"In Top Form"

I'm kidding, of course — at least one of these is a terrible title. But I'm not kidding about the process, about that feeling of inversion. A poem, for me, is an ending following by a beginning. There's a freedom in that reversal: something that's over before it begins never needs to end.

 

 

 

 

 

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022) and his work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Fiddlehead, GEIST, Grain, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and Riddle Fence. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, is forthcoming with Brick Books in 2026.

Misha Solomon, Elana Wolff, Marlon L. Fick + Nathanael O’Reilly : virtual reading series #20

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Misha Solomon : “Chunnel,” “this isn’t a gay poem” “Two Hearts”

Misha Solomon (he/him) is a queer poet in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His chapbook debut, FLORALS, was published in 2020 by above/ground press, and he recently had an essay in the "Talking Poetics" series over at the ottawa poetry newsletter.

Elana Wolff : “Tumbrel”

Elana Wolff is the author of six solo collections of poetry and a collection of essays on poems. She has also co-authored, with the late Malca Litovitz, a collection of rengas; co-authored a chapbook of poems with Susie Petersiel Berg; co-edited with Julie Roorda a collection of poems written to poets and the stories that inspired them; and co-translated with Menachem Wolff poems from the Hebrew by Georg Mordechai Langer. Elana’s poems and creative nonfiction pieces have been published in Canada and internationally and have garnered awards. She has taught English for Academic Purposes at York University in Toronto and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently divides her professional time between writing, literary editing, and designing and facilitating social art courses. Swoon (Guernica Editions, 2020) is her sixth collection of poems.

Marlon L. Fick : “Swallows” from The Tenderness and the Wood (2020).

Marlon L. Fick is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Literature and Languages. He holds a BA from the University of Kansas (Philosophy), an MA from New York University (Poetics/English), and PhD from the University of Kansas (English). He is author of three poetry collections, a book of short stories, and the novel The Nowhere Man (Jaded Ibis, 2015), and is editor/translator of The River Is Wide / El río es ancho: Twenty Mexican Poets (New Mexico, 2005), as well as XEIXA: 14 Catalan Poet (Tupelo, 2018).  The Tenderness and the Wood is published by Guernica Editions (2020). Awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, ConaCulta in Mexico, and Institut Ramon Llull in Catalonia, he now teaches at the University of Texas–Permian Basin. He specializes in Comparative Poetics.

Nathanael O’Reilly : “Your Gaze” and “Beach Ballet” from (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020) and “Grey” from BLUE (above/ground press, 2020)

Nathanael O’Reilly is an Irish-Australian residing in Texas. His books include (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020); Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017), named a Book of the Year in Australian Book Review; Cult (Ginninderra Press, 2016); Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015); Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011); and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). More than 200 of his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies published in thirteen countries, including Antipodes, Anthropocene, Australian Love Poems, Backstory, Cordite, fourW, FourXFour, Headstuff, Marathon, Mascara, Postcolonial Text, Skylight 47, Snorkel, Tincture, Transnational Literature, Westerly and The Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2017. His chapbook BLUE is new from above/ground press.

Dessa Bayrock : Misha Solomon, milk envy, and other riddles of parenting and jealousy

The Cruelty-Free Ivory Tower: a recovering grad student presents tongue-in-cheek semi-academic poetry reviews

For a long time, I disliked children. What, really, is to like about them? They’re tiny people who don’t have their shit together, and don’t know how to get it together, and — worst of all — have almost zero impetus to get it together. They’re loud, scattered, overemotional, and constantly in need of attention. 

And yet: children are also creative, and hilarious, and occasionally fill their little bodies with so much love and surprising tenderness that their capacity for goodness seems impossible, illegal, miraculous. Children, somehow, are the best and worst of us: tiny tornadoes of unrestrained impulsivity, whether for good or ill. 

Misha Solomon’s poem “Milk Envy” perfectly sums up these feelings about children: how irritating and horrible they are, and yet how vital and precious. It’s a fine balance to strike, and one that most poems about children seem to shy away from; it’s hard to write about hatred and make it into a poem about love, and yet Solomon does exactly that. “Milk Envy” is brilliant, honest, and also, frankly, a relief — to witness someone else’s confession that yes, children are truly unlikeable, and that these feelings of annoyance can exist simultaneously with loving them.

Although it’s not explicitly stated, I imagine this poem takes place in a waiting room — the kind of waiting room we’ve all been in, time after time, in which a child just won’t stop crying. “your child is screaming,” Solomon writes, the first line of the first and longest stanza. “he’s not even crying / just screaming / in a vague imitation of sadness”. There are so many things to dislike about this scene, and Solomon dives deeply into what can be uncomfortable or even taboo territory: that children are annoying, and we, the innocent bystanders, are expected to endure it. “your child keeps dropping his numbered tiles,” Solomon writes, in a tone both vicious and bored. “your child can’t seem to put his tiles in order / your child is a fucking idiot / untalented at both art and science”. 

This is where the poem begins to build its complexity; after all, this isn’t just about hating loud children and their half-hearted bad-actor screams for attention, although it is definitely also that, but also about the ways in which this feeling of intense dislike can be shared or transformed — even by parents themselves. “and you / you don’t even seem to like him / all that much” Solomon realizes, addressing the parent in question, seemingly shocked, satisfied, and annoyed by this development. “you look at me and smile sheepishly and roll your eyes in his direction / as if to say: / sorry about my fucking idiot child / he is untalented at art and science / I know / and I hate him for it”. 

For a second, it feels as if this shared hatred will bring these two strangers together — a tender moment of connection at the expense of this annoying kid. The poem could end here, if it wanted to, in this perfect vignette of commiseration. 

But Solomon isn’t done yet; rather than allow the parent the easy escape of commiseration, he spits out another satisfyingly mean take-down of the parent, insulting their “balding husband” and his “slimy cock” which “produced / the worst actor I’ve ever seen” – namely, this screaming child who isn’t even sad, but merely imitating sadness, and doing it badly.

But here comes a surprising shift in tone within the same stanza, before the reader can catch their breath to laugh at the proverbial slimy cock.

“I’ve been fucked too you know / and I’ve fucked”, Solomon says, quieter now, a confession that reads as strangely mournful. “and never have I produced / a child”. 

There is something like a muted pride in these lines, but also somehow a confession of loss, of unsurity, of possibilities which have been avoided or unanswered. never have I produced a child. Is this Solomon’s way of apologizing, condemning, or mourning? It could be any of the above. In many ways, it feels like all three. 

This shift cracks something open in the poem, and here we begin to crest the last loop of the roller coaster, ripping away the facade of Solomon’s judgmental dislike and beginning to show us, the reader, what this scene has perhaps been about from the first. Because this parent does love their child — a depth of emotion that can’t be undone or obscured by sheepish smile or a roll of the eyes. “You hug your screaming, idiot child,” Solomon narrates, which at first reads as a critique but then, perhaps, as a realization. “You hug your screaming, idiot child, / hold him close to your breast, / where he surely suckled you raw, // and my nipples ache with jealous rage.” 

Here, then, finally, is where the riddle unravels: the place where hatred shields love, or else belies love as the other side of a shared coin. The jealous truth hides behind intense dislike, behind pride, behind rage, behind aching nipples, but emerges to be heard: every “screaming, idiot child” has a place on this earth, even if it is not with us. This realization is both a blessing, for those of us who never want to produce children, and a moment of grief, for those whose “nipples ache with jealous rage”. It is a poignant moment, amidst the satisfying meanness and hilarity of Solomon’s diatribe against this horrible actor, this screaming kid in this hypothetical waiting room, and it sits quietly at the end of the poem on its own. The truth revealed, there is nothing more to be said on the matter, and so, too, the poem winds to its finish: “You hold him close, / and exchange smiles, / and I get up and go.”

Dessa Bayrock lives in Ottawa with two cats and a variety of succulents, one of which occasionally blooms. She used to fold and unfold paper for a living at Library and Archives Canada, and is currently a PhD student in English, where she continues to fold and unfold paper. Her work has appeared in Funicular, PRISM, and Poetry Is Dead, among others, and her work was recently shortlisted for the Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. She is the editor of post ghost press. You can find her, or at least more about her, at dessabayrock.com, or on Twitter at @yodessa.