He is a co-editor of the Laurier Poetry Series, https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Series/L/Laurier-Poetry, and lives with his wife, Charlene Winger, in Grey Highlands, Ontario, Canada.
How does a poem begin?
Really, I have no idea. A poem can begin anywhere, and often seemingly out of nothing: I wake up in the middle of the night with a phrase; I’m out for a walk and there’s a rhythm that loops in a few words after a while; an image mirages as a response to something seen, but even the lines that emerge from seemingly nowhere I believe are at heart a responsiveness to something, if nothing more than the process of being. It’s kind of a spontaneous responsiveness if that’s possible, but just as often these little sparks and pools of light will arrive if I’m mulling something over, immersing myself in a memory, a theory, an event, but it’s almost that I want to say it begins with X. There’s the story of Descartes struggling with some problem which was giving him great grief and so he just finally gave up; but in a carriage on his way home from somewhere weeks later, the answer popped into his head. Researchers have been exploring “self-talk” – that continuous inner voice we’re always hearing that tells us who we think we are – annoying as that can sometimes be. They also though, in exploring this inner voice, have pointed to a condensed inner speech which is highly abbreviated and often even ungrammatical and perhaps even wordless, an inner hearing, a voice not our own at the tip of the unconscious. Hmm. Were poets their subjects in these explorations? Anyway, the poem sometime begins, and if it does, it comes as a gift, and the poem itself (if it happens), only after --Cohen called it ashes -- and only if we’re lucky with further gifts engendered by the first; then there’s the writing, with luck, floating flying delving to maybe dream in words.
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