On Starting a Poem

How do you enter a poem? Where does it start? Where is it going? Even seasoned poets are sometimes baffled by these questions. The good news is, you already have all the material you need inside of you for a great poem—the work is simply bringing that material to the page. 

Let’s do a close study of how poems begin.

Close Study: “Because the Color Is Half the Taste” by Paige Lewis

Retrieved from The Spectacle.

it’s a shame to eat blackberries in the dark,
but that’s exactly what I’m up to when a man

startles down the street screaming, The fourth
dimension is not time! He makes me feel stupid

and it’s hard to sleep knowing so little
about everything, so I enroll in a night class

where I learn the universe is an arrow
without end and it asks only one question:

How dare you? I recite it in bed, How dare
you? How dare you? But still I can’t find sleep.

So I go out where winter is and roll
around in the snow until a sharp rock

meets the vulnerable plush of my belly.
A little blood. Hunched over, I must look

like I’m hiding something I don’t want to share.
And I suppose that’s true—the sharp,

the warm wet. The color is half the pain. Why
would anyone else want to see? How dare they?

“Where is this poem taking me?” That’s a question I often ask myself when a poem ends up moving me in startling and unexpected ways. Paige Lewis is a master of this: any time I read a poem of theirs, I’m taken on a journey that seems random and disjointed, until the final lines make sense of the chaos. “Because the Color is Half the Taste” does this for me: makes sense of associations so fragmented and random, I end up in awe of the kaleidoscope of things.

Here are three craft elements that make this poem work magic:

• The narrative built from (seemingly) random associations.
• The poem’s ending where it began, transformed by its journey.
• The speaker’s treatment of feeling as fact, and how it colors the poem unashamedly.

When poets first start writing poetry, they often make the mistake of thinking a poem must stick to its subject the entire time. Well, I started this poem because I was inspired by the sun winking through the trees, so the entire poem has to be about that. This isn’t the case: while some poems benefit from staying “on topic,” most poems benefit far more from the juxtaposition of different ideas and images. Sometimes, the reader can see that connection right away. In the case of Lewis’ poem, not so much: we start with blackberries in the dark, then catapult into astrophysics.

This poem is rather short, but it feels as though it goes through such a long journey. Here’s where we’ve gone with the speaker: blackberries, man screaming on the street, the fourth dimension, night classes, the universe, time asking us “how dare you?”, winter rocks bleeding the speaker’s belly, blood, pain, the dark.

So we return where we began: the power of color, and its ability to alter or heighten our experiences. But we begin with color’s impact on taste, and end with color’s impact on pain. Suddenly, the shame of eating blackberries in the dark has transformed into a question: why would anyone want to see, when sight only heightens the pain?

Of course, we can’t neglect the journey that’s taken us from pleasure to pain. Central to the poem, both physically and thematically, is the speaker’s interpretation of time-space:

I learn the universe is an arrow
without end and it asks only one question:

How dare you? I recite it in bed, How dare
you? How dare you? But still I can’t find sleep.

If you ask an astrophysicist what they think of these couplets, they’ll probably tell you that, no, the arrow of the universe (the progression of time-space) is not asking the question “How dare you?” It probably isn’t asking anything at all, and even if it is, it probably isn’t concerned with our existence enough to ask such an indignified question.

What these couplets reveal to us is the speaker’s interpretation of time. We learn a lot about them from this moment in the poem: it reveals their vulnerabilities, how small they feel in the face of the universe, which must be staring directly at us if it asks such a provocative question. What does this reveal? If time’s incessant march is a dare, how will we answer that dare? Do we live our lives anyway, aware that time will punish us for daring against it? Such questions are likely to keep me up just as late as the speaker is.

It might seem like this poem ends rather darkly, but I think it’s more important to explore what these questions reveal to us, rather than to take the darkness at face value. The dark blankets the pain, yes, but also the beauty, and if our lives are dares against the passage of time, shouldn’t we dare vibrantly? The speaker wants to hide what makes them vulnerable, hunched over and in the dark, bleeding only for themselves—but aren’t we most alive when we bleed for and in front of each other? This poem is a dare, certainly, but to me it’s a dare to life, despite the cosmic terror of being alive in a seemingly random, indifferent, omniscient universe. If sight is a dare, this poem stares down the barrel of life both small and mighty, deeply afraid and choosing to live anyway.

Craft Perspective: “On Starting a Poem” by Richard Hugo

Read it here, in LitHub.

This essay, out of Richard Hugo’s craft book The Triggering Town, is like a mini-MFA class all on its own. I love the advice in this, not only because it’s true, but because it empowers poets to step outside the lines of logic and reasoning, and let their poems form their own logic.

Hugo helpfully breaks down the “aboutness” of a poem into two categories:

• The Initiating Subject: The reason for writing the poem in the first place; the doorway into the poem’s start.
• The Generated Subject: What the poem comes to say or mean as the poet discovers what the poem is really about.

So, while you might have started a poem about the ocean, the poem evolved to become about your relationship to your mother. Both of these things are important, but the generated subject (the relationship to your mother) is far more interesting and evocative, because it reaches towards something true, intimate, real, and lived for the speaker.

Knowing this breakdown should empower you to write poems that follow their own internal logic. Just because you started a poem about the ocean, doesn’t mean the poem needs to stick to the ocean, or that every image and metaphor must be nautical. Poems evolve, and the poet evolves the poem through careful attention towards language, and through putting to paper the mysterious inner workings of the psyche.

Just look at Paige Lewis’ poem. We began with the blackberries in the dark, then quickly got into matters of space and time. How did we get here? More importantly, what does the juxtaposition of these two things reveal? What do we learn by exploring time’s constant forward progress? The generated subject here is much more interesting—especially because, once the poem returns to its initiating subject, we find that we’ve gained a lot through the poem’s transformation. Lewis has put their initiating and generated subjects into conversation with one another, resulting in something far more provocative for the reader.

Other great bits of advice from this article:

• In the world of imagination, all things belong.
• Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand.
• You must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there…. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.
• Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.
• The words should not serve the subject. The subject should serve the words.
• You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.