beginning and end

The beginning and the end of a poem provide its essential structure. Not that what happens in between doesn’t matter, it does, but with that essential outer support it’s likely to stand.

not much to go on

A poem may start with a premise, or only a promise.

top-heavy

A poem top-heavy with its best lines; toppling before its close.

against story

Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications.

—William Gass, “Finding a Form,” Finding A Form: Essays (Knopf, 1996)

soft start

The beginning was too benign.

end or beginning

Was it the last line of this poem, or the first line of the next?

great leap

A first line that made you believe anything could happen next.

dark wood

Why is it that each day it seems I awaken within a dark wood and yet I’ve never once embarked on composing a ‘Divine Comedy’?

not bounded

No matter its first and last line a poem has no beginning or end.

end and beginning

The poem ends just when you were beginning to understand it.