Renato Gandia : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

Perhaps a poem begins when the past stops agreeing with what we remember about it.

Most of my poems begin there: with a memory, an encounter, something I witnessed, something I didn’t fully understand when it happened, or something I have not completely accepted or made peace with. I return to it years later and discover that what I remember and what I now understand are not necessarily the same thing.

I have learned not to ask too quickly what it means.

Perhaps this is because I spent years working in journalism and communications, where language is expected to tell you what it means. Clarity matters. You answer the questions a reader is likely to have and try not to leave too much room for misunderstanding.

Poetry asks something different of me. A poem often begins precisely where my ability to explain something ends.

I grew up with other kinds of language, too. Before journalism, there was the language of the Catholic Church. I spent thirteen years in priestly formation, where words were repeated until they became ritual: prayers, responses, scripture, the language of consecration. Long before I understood repetition as a poetic device, I understood its power as prayer.

And before all of these, there was Tagalog.

I write primarily in English now, but I don’t think I write only from English. Somewhere underneath a poem are the languages that formed me. Sometimes a Tagalog word enters because English cannot do what I need it to do. Sometimes English itself feels slightly strange in my mouth, and I have come to think that strangeness can be useful.

I saw these impulses come together while writing Eating Rice, On Our Feet, my first poetry collection. Many of its poems grew from experiences I had carried for years without fully reckoning with them.

As a journalist in Edmonton and Calgary, I reported on temporary foreign workers living in crowded houses, sometimes thirteen people sharing four bedrooms. I understood the conditions as a reporter: overcrowding, health and safety, the precarious circumstances of migrant workers. But I also came from the Philippines, where several generations and extended family sharing a home can be perfectly acceptable. Years later, when my own brother came to Canada and experienced similar living conditions, what I had once encountered as someone else’s story became painfully close to my own.

That contradiction stayed with me.

This is often where a poem begins for me: not because I have resolved a contradiction, but because I haven’t. Poetry gives me somewhere to put two things that appear unable to occupy the same space and ask them to remain there together.

This may be why ordinary things recur throughout Eating Rice, On Our Feet: rice, pots, spoons, hands, mouths, meals. They are attached to experiences, and those experiences change when examined. Rice can become hunger, migration or the wish to belong. Cooking can be labour and love at once. Feeding someone can be tenderness, obligation, survival, even resistance.

I am less interested in deciding beforehand what these images mean than in discovering what happens when I stay with them. If I already know exactly what the rice means, I probably have an essay, not yet a poem.

The poem has to surprise me.

For a long time, I thought revision meant making a poem clearer. I still value clarity, but I am learning that revision can also mean allowing a poem to remain unresolved. Sometimes the stronger choice is not another explanation but an image. Not another sentence but a break. Not another word but white space.

Perhaps this is also what makes a good poem for me. I want it to risk something. I want to encounter something I recognize and then discover that I have never quite seen it that way.

Maybe a good poem does not reconcile us with the past. Maybe it does something more difficult: it asks us to return to what we thought we knew and remain there long enough for certainty to give way.

The experiences that begin my poems are often ones I have carried for years. I used to think I returned to them because I wanted to understand them.

Now I think I return because they are still capable of changing me.

And perhaps that is where the next poem begins.

 

 

 

 

 

Renato Gandia is a Filipino-Canadian writer whose work explores migration, memory, faith belonging, and queer identity. He is the winner of the 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for poetry presented by Writers’ Trust of Canada, and his work has appeared in literary publications and anthologies in Canada and abroad. He is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Eating Rice, On Our Feet (Frontenac House, 2027) and memoir Unpriesting (Freehand Books, 2027). He is the managing editor of Salingpusa and acquisitions editor of Constellations of Becoming: Queer Futures and Other Worlds. He lives in Calgary and writes about the stories we inherit, the selves we abandon, and the people who teach us how to begin again.

Sanna Wani : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

How does a poem begin?

For me, with a feeling. For others, it’s a form of thinking – or being – or some other verbiage. A kind of doing. I don’t know about doing, though, lately. I resist the poem’s doing and I’m more interested in it’s feeling. It’s radar for intimacy. I’ve always been like that, though. I want to be close to the world. I want to curl up inside its rind.

What makes a good poem?

Might as well ask what makes goodness. A good question, for sure, a complicated one too. I’m thinking now of ouroboros, the snake eating itself, when I think of goodness. It’s binary, I’ve resisted all my life. Over and over, we’re told or we’re telling each other to resist goodness, even as we strive for it. It’s an important question in my own work. Danez Smith recently had a great little PSA on Instagram about the importance of a bad poem, how we love to poem before it performs for us whatever deem to be a poem’s goodness – it’s craft – it’s culture – it’s empirical or enterprising ability.

Over and over again, I’ve returned to the idea that a good poem, for me, is a poem that changes me fundamentally. You’re a different person after you’re done reading it, or something in the world is different because of it. The poem that knows you’re going to die, I’ve heard attributed to Solmaz Sharif. The poem that knows how I want to live, I want to say back.

 

 

 

 

Sanna Wani [photo credit: Hamzah Amin] is a Kashmiri writer, editor, and translator based in Toronto. She is the author of My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi Press, 2022) and Lantern (House of Anansi Press, 2026).

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.