How does a poem begin?
I fall hardest for poems that have an intriguing first line, then I’m compelled to follow wherever it leads me. I was reading José Olivarez’s “Mexican American Disambugation,” where he’s describing his parents, who are “Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexican Americans/ or Chicanos,” and I’m like, “Yeaaahh.” The narrative of cataloguing diasporic people changes depending on if you’re in-in or in-out or just plain outside. Sometimes it’s the title that gets me as well. Jill Osier’s poem “September” unfolds a tragic farm scene which becomes a temporal marker in the speaker’s memory or landscape of the year. Sometimes when I write, there’s an image I can’t get out of my head, and I don’t want to turn it into a metaphor. I try to translate the moment into a compelling wondering—maybe relatable, maybe epiphanic. Oh, and I learned from William Nuʻutupu Giles, an afakasi Samoan writer, that sometimes people don’t remember titles, but they remember the subject, like his “Deodorant” poem or Gabriella Bates’s “The Dog” poem. Unforgettable poems. So, I try to begin a poem with that idea in the corner of my mind.
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