How does a poem begin?
For me a poem always begins with the title. Always. I don't approach a blank page thinking that I have something to say, I am totally driven by imagery. Actually, that's not even completely accurate. I am driven by emotion. I don't write poetry to tell you something or to picture something. I write poetry to make you feel something. And I try to do it in as few words as possible. For me, titles are the purest distillation of a poem. Everything after the title is explanation. This is what made the first part of Lunatic Engine so easy to write, the chapter titles in Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, which I took for the titles of the poems in the first section of my book, are poetry in and of themselves. These titles led into the matter in the chapters and I took my direction for the poems from both.
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