How does a poem begin?
For me, each poem begins differently. A poem could come as a single image or idea that I then carry around for weeks, months, years, before giving it shape. Often enough a poem comes as a title. Images, lines, jokes, insights, questions, conundrums, phrases, rages large and small accrue and accrue until gravity kicks in. Poems come in ones, twos, threes, twenties. Take a poem like “Cousinage,” from Shifting Baseline Syndrome, for example. I had been joking that my partner Steph and I were eighteenth cousins for years, but it wasn’t until I came across the word “cousinage” in a French dictionary that the poem took form and combusted; after that, it more or less spooled out of me. This is opposed to poems such as “Eighteen Ways of Looking at Magneto Destroying Auschwitz in X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Hydrophobia,” or “Off-Screen,” which I had to work on for many months.
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