How does a poem begin?
For me, a poem begins with any line that you can’t otherwise extricate from inside yourself unless you write it down. These can also begin as images or experiences or feelings, but I find my mind is very language-driven, and I think in fragments if not complete sentences. The initial lines don’t necessarily remain the first lines of poems – sometimes they migrate down a stanza or two, sometimes they wind up at the very end. An example of this is what became the last line of “a Demy trilogy spinoff,” the first poem in my forthcoming collection (originally published in Harbor Review): “if this were my life i could live like this.” It is a line that continues to echo around inside me. That, to me, is the beginning of a poem.
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