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.
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.
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