Shelly Harder : part one

Shelly Harder hails from rural Ontario. A first chapbook, remnants, came out with Baseline Press in 2018. Find more of their work at hardershelly.wordpress.com.

How does a poem begin?

Fragmentary impulse, feckless endeavour, erratic outpouring. Whichever, when it happens that I’ve stumbled upon a configuration of words – it could be a brief phrase – that makes a demand, and I can’t ignore it, the words require a place that could be for them a home, then a poem is, at the least, attempting to begin.