How does a poem begin?
Please let me know. If I knew this secret it would be much easier to start. I am much more comfortable with the landing of a poem, that tension and release of a final line. My poems begin with description and I have to work to whittle them down. I don’t always know what I’m writing when I set out to write and the revised finished product never looks like what I thought it would when I started. I’ve tried several times to start with the particular curl of the snake plant on my window sill and ended up writing about my grandmother making pie or performing dissections in high school biology class. Beginnings are just the start, so the poem doesn’t “begin” until I have the landing, then I can figure out how to make it all cohere.
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