How
does a poem begin?
With an instigating line, or an image, maybe a
sound, a dream even. Or witnessing something so bizarre it begs for the
slantwise approach of poetry to make sense of it. This morning I read an
article (on the heels of another horrific school shooting) about a religious
congregation in Pennsylvania coming to church in the hundreds for a mass
wedding of all congregants. And they were toting their AR-15 rifles because
they believe the AR-15 symbolizes the "rod of iron" in the biblical
Book of Revelation. How can this not be the basis of a poem?
I often discover after I have written a poem
that the reason I wrote it, the motivating force, was to try to understand or
make some sense of the incomprehensible. Fortunately, I don’t see that when I
start writing, or it would probably wreck the poem.
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