How does a poem begin?
It begins with a line typed on the page and the line has a little tail that hangs down and curls halfway under itself until it becomes the line below. I cut that tail off and it regrows. I cut it off again. It regrows. When at last it winds across another line or two, I can see what kind of animal it is. Then I can begin to see what other kinds of animals it might be able to live around. For me, everything depends on husbanding the growth of that first line, its development into something approximating a stanza. I really do tend to think of it like some little animal that intrudes in the field of vision, a Pangur Bán, because it has nothing to do with my own intention for the page. I admit it to companionship. It comes from somewhere out in the real world – from anywhere, really – but it must be from the real world or I have no use for it. For the better part of this quarantined year, my world has been a ten-block radius, so now all my poems begin at the northernmost terminal of the Jerome Avenue Line. I know whether a particular poem is possible or not through the process of cajoling that line into an initial stanza. Whereas I need to see the first line on the page, the rest of the stanza happens first in the mind and the ear. When it appears in the page, it is pure transcription. I perform little revision of a poem after I draft it but a great deal of variation plays out in translation between the eye’s first line and the ear’s stanza.
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