Jane Zwart : part one

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and Poetry, as well as other journals and magazines.

How does a poem begin?

A poem begins with a seed or a crumb or a grain of sand--that is, a poem begins in particularity, at least for me. It begins with the image or the object; with a gesture or words lined up, already, into a little train. That particular thing doesn’t always stay at the beginning of the poem, of course, but it’s what begins the poem. 

For a long time, I could only write poems that started with a seed, poems whose particularity was ready to germinate, already, before I even arrived. I did also keep a folder of “poem crumbs.” Sometimes a crumb will change into a seed if you’re patient. 

But only in the past couple years have I learned to build poems whose cornerstones are grains of sand. The poet (and novelist) Amit Majmudar pushed me to try that: to take a granular something and improvise a poem from it and, far more often than I would have believed, the poem does happen. I’ll always be grateful to Amit for that.