Jennifer May Newhook : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

I do not know how a poem begins, only that it does . . .and if I’m very lucky, in my own work, at some point I recognize this. Some poems write themselves almost in absentia in the notes app on my phone, where I keep a miscellanea of odd words, overheard conversations, fleeting thoughts, and fragmented images, that for me, in whatever moment, I found—and continue to find—striking. Intuition, my inner assessor, thematically roughly groups these fragments, and often, it turns out, they (or I) are trying to say something. A good poetry workshop also for me will often very quickly produce the guts of a poem.

Some of my poems are troublesome, born from a complexity that is unknowable—to me at least—but insists, insists that it be reckoned with. These are the most difficult poems to wrestle with. The ones where every word feels clunky, every line break ill placed. Half finished, they languish in digital folders and on scraps of paper. Forgotten, they ferment. Re-found . . . perhaps I’ll add another word or two (usually ill advised). Perhaps I’ll erase a phrase (usually to the good). Poems like this take months, even years, to evolve into something I consider “finished.” I usually have a couple of these percolating in the background at any given time—I do like to honour the slow-time aspects of creation, because creativity is a completely different animal than productivity!

The most fun poems for me of course are those where inspiration strikes suddenly, when the fingers and pen can move barely fast enough to capture the words. These usually require little editing, or at least I find it best to not mess with these ones too much—a single misplaced move, and a fragile ecosystem of words can irretrievably collapse. There is multiplicity to consider, always. This word may not be perfect, but is it doing the good work of holding the other ones up? That word may disrupt the cadence . . . but does it lead you towards another one more compelling?

Perhaps what makes a good poem to read is not the same thing that makes a poem good to write. For me, good poems are imperfect—when crafted too meticulously, they tend to glide across my eyes and slide too quickly across my brain. I can appreciate them, but they do not settle in my marrow. They do not pierce to the quick. I like poems with surprises, jagged edges, off rhythms and rhymes. A thought that lands just ahead or behind the beat. An image imperfectly captured but arresting. An idea or emotion that rises to the surface but does not breach.

For me, mystery is an important thing to preserve—the unknowable-ness of things—which is perhaps why I am drawn irresistibly towards poetry, even when it is imperfect or challenging to engage with. In our increasingly digital lives, I sense something happening; I think of it as The Great Flattening. Images are saturated, bright lights shine everywhere, flaws exist only to be repaired or erased, and words are recycled by machines until they lose the meaning that made them words in the first place. In this brightly lit, saturated, compressed world, stumbling doggedly over distance towards some uneven, hidden thing for a fleeting moment that might either shine or slip through our fingers, now seems more necessary than ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jennifer May Newhook’s first full-length poetry collection, Last Hours, was released in 2024 by Riddle Fence Press, and she is currently working on the last, last draft of her first novel The Gulch, some flash fiction, new poems, and a collection of short stories. She has new work coming in the summer issue of The Dalhousie Review.

Qurat Dar : What makes a good poem

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

How does a poem begin?

I was going to say a poem really begins when the poet begins because every poem pulls from the sum of our life’s experiences, from the lens we have developed to see the world, and so on, but it felt both generic and unhelpful.

So. To be less obnoxious about it, I think the literal beginning of a poem for me is generally some small friction, an observation or image or concept or feeling that sticks out. When I’ve started collecting enough of them in my Notes app and/or notebook that orbit each other there’s a feeling kind of like having a loose tooth, the seed of a poem lurking in the back of my mind. I’ll worry it every now and again, try to feel its shape, its give.

Eventually once it feels like the concept of the poem has reached a critical mass I’ll sit down and take a crack at it. Once in a while (rarer than I’d like) the poem will rush out all at once. More often I have to sit with the different pieces I’ve gathered, arrange them, find how they connect.  Sometimes I’ll only get partway through the poem and have to wait until I’ve gathered more threads to tie into the poem, revisit it until it reaches some semblance of completeness.

What makes a good poem?

I have to resist the urge to sound like a vague and somewhat unreasonable call for submissions here. Yeah it’s pretty great when a poem throws all the windows open, sings to the marrow, sets fire to the mountain, etc. etc. but I think a poem can still be “good” without being the kind of poem that’s once-in-a-lifetime. By “good,” I mean, in my completely subjective and extremely biased opinion, a poem that is compelling, that draws you in, that moves you in some way.

I think, to be boring and straightforward about it, a good poem has something to say and has found the right way to say it. A poem whose content feels seamless with the choice of poetic elements such as form, structure, metaphor, language, and sound. By “seamless” I don’t mean obvious or predictable, rather that the poem’s central tension and the poem’s building blocks complement and heighten each other, sharpen the poem, bring it into relief.

I think a good poem finds a balance of frills and honesty. I love a little self-indulgent twirling as much as the next poet, but too much and the poem feels like a cotton candy void. Too little and it feels like reading a report instead of a poem. Then there is what is said and what is left unsaid, if the poet gives the reader enough substance to grip the poem while leaving enough space for them to find themselves in the poem or to consider multiple layers of meaning, multiple paths through the poem.   

There’s more criteria, of course, like if the poem feels fresh or inventive, if it challenges the reader, its timeliness. But this cohesion and balance are what I find to be the foundation of a good poem. 

 

 

 

 

Qurat Dar is the author of Non-Prophet (Goose Lane Editions 2025), winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She was the City of Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021-2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam National Champion. Qurat’s poems have appeared in Augur, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, and across the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) network.

Melanie Dennis Unrau : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

In March 2026, seven versions of my poem “My Lullaby” from my book Goose (Assembly, 2025) were displayed in the Rooster Town Poetry Shed, a sidewalk poetry display in a part of Winnipeg that was built on land the city cleared by evicting the Métis community of Rooster Town. Bernie Kruchak, a white-settler resident who created and curates the Shed as a reconciliation project, went through the early drafts and alternate versions of my Goose poems to put together this series. The text below is adapted from the six artist’s statements I wrote for displaying in the Shed.

This is my first draft of “My Lullaby.” I made it by hand-tracing words and images where they appear in the source poem, using fine-tipped pens on tracing paper. The source is “My Lullaby” from the 1956 edition of Northland Trails by “father of the tar sands” Sidney Clarke Ells (1878-1971), a mining engineer who devoted his career to building a tar-sands industry in the Athabasca region on Treaty 8 territory. Ells’s works are in the public domain. In this version, I test out words and patterns I might want to work with, seeking to convey both Ells’s earnest claims to love the land and my sense that those claims are disingenuous.

 

In this second draft, I lean into the lullaby. Instead of reproducing full words, I break up Ells’s often-cloying language and trace lullaby-like sounds. The effect is satisfyingly silly and ironic.

The third draft narrows the constraint of the previous version to trace only the lullaby-sounds “oo,” “lu,” and “la.” I made a mistake when tracing but continued to see how it would look; the next version would be one of the layers in the version that went in the book.

 

In this version, I trace part of Ells’s illustration for his poem. Eventually, I will end up layering images like this one with the word-layer of my poem.

 

This version combines a word-layer and an image-layer; it’s similar to the way the poem is built in layers over five pages in Goose. I would call this an alternate version of the poem rather than a draft.

 

Another alternate version combines a word-layer with two image-layers.

 

This photo, taken by Bernie Kruchak, shows one page from the five-page version of the poem “My Lullaby” that is published in Goose. Many tracings are layered on top of each other in this version—not so much a “final” version as one variation of a changeable poem.

 

 

 

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a white-settler poet, editor, scholar, parent, and climate organizer from Treaty One territory and Métis homeland in Winnipeg. She is the author of the poetry collections Goose (Assembly, 2025) and Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013), and the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024). She co-edited the poetry anthology I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Roseway, 2025).