How does a poem begin?
Sometimes with a ghost, sometimes with a joke. Although before that, before the immediate inciting incident, there is a slow and steady accumulation of fragments: overheard phrases, unbidden ideas, resonant texts, facts that scream to be made into metaphors. I spend my time moving through the world and collecting these little fragments, jotting them down in notebooks, suspending them from the rafters of my brain where they can sway and sing together.
And then, the inciting incident: A hypothetical question about eating your clone, for example. That gives the fragments something to coalesce around. It gives them a shared premise. It illuminates their similarities, heightens their differences. They all begin casting light and shadow on one another, melting into one another, gesturing toward other fragments, morphing into strange new entities with many faces. It’s all quite chaotic.
So what you need to do, then, is find that line or phrase to anchor them – like binding a spirit to a cursed object. That’s the first line – maybe not sequentially in the finished poem, but temporally in the poem’s life. And the rest of the writing process is about cultivating that line so that it twists and grows and ramifies into the poem, with branches of the right length and heft to support the constantly shifting weight of all those fragments.
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