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Someone recently asked me about my favorite beginning of a poem. While favorite is a nearly impossible question, in preparation for this Sunday’s Beginnings and Endings workshop, I have spent the last month asking:
What makes a beginning and/or ending last?
How does a poem garner the power to make people literally sigh after it ends?
What makes a poem so remarkable that a line, image, or moment echoes years after you read it for the first time?
For the upcoming workshop, I’m whittling my list down to 10 specific moves. But there is always one poem with a beginning and ending so compelling and unexpected that I just have to write about it.
Read the poem below by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
The thing I love about this poem is that it does the opposite of what most poems do. Many poems rely on the momentum of building towards a reveal, heavy truth or even punch line to gain. But instead of building to some watery crescendo or high point of tension, Limón gives you the tension or conflict upfront. The poem begins with the horses that have died. “There. That’s the hard part. I wanted / to tell you straight away so we could / grieve together.”
The poem asks, “Now what?” Now what, after the hard thing has already come and gone? Now what, that I have already said the hard thing? The poem could have continued to ruminate on these horses, on the details of the situation. But grief is a family meal. Eventually, we all sit down at the table, so instead of telling us how one single event hurts, it becomes about how all events hurt. It personifies the heart, its reaction, adding moments of levity: “The heart is watching Lifetime movies.” And a universal response to anguish: “missing all the good / parts of her that she has forgotten.”
To create and release tension early on, to keep us reading, requires an enormous amount of skill by the poet. But Limón also creates an iconic ending, briefly piggybacking on the initial tension, the subject of our grief, transforming the beginning context into a deep and haunting metaphor.
My challenge to you: Think about where you put tension in your poem. Is there a line you are building towards? Is it at the end or in the beginning? What would happen if you moved that tension to the top of the poem? What would happen if you didn’t rely on the reveal/truth/punchline, and instead focused on what the reveal says about the world or human condition?
Warm Up
1. Make a list of hard things that you have seen, heard, or experienced. For example: a divorce, a life-changing accident, ending a friendship, heartbreak, etc.
2. Pick one hard thing from your list and write down images you associate with it. For example, for divorce: cleaning out a closet, switching out the photos in the picture frames, dropping off a child at an ex’s house.
3. Make a list of things you do when dealing with hard things. For example: crying in a bubble bath, eating an entire bag of chips, online shopping.
Read “Downhearted” by Ada Limón again.
Prompt:
Write a poem about a hard thing that has happened. Share the hard part right in the beginning. Explore the aftermath of or reaction to the hard thing. How can you return to the tension you wove in the beginning at the end, with a new understanding? What has it taught you about yourself? About the world?
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What are some of your favorite poem endings and beginnings? I would love to hear what gives you goosebumps and makes your toes tingle in the comments below.
Thanks so much for sharing <3
Kelly, one of my all time favorite poems is the double sestina "Incest Taboo," by Denise Duhamel. I first stumbled on it in the Best American Poetry 2000 as I was taking my first undergrad workshop. It was probably the first poem that really made me want to be a formalist. It's a textbook in how to write a sestina--double or otherwise--and the ending absolutely blows my mind. There are lots of poems with great endings, and the Duhamel poem always rises to the top of my list, even after all these years. Your posts about beginnings and endings made me think of this poem, again--thank you! If you can get your hands on a copy of that issue, it's well worth the read. Kim has a great poem in it as well. And btw I love this Ada Limon poem oh so much--thanks for sharing!