crack of the lash

Poet, crack that first line like a lash.

top down

Your title is cliché…it’s all going downhill from there.

not much to go on

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

very large fish

A Line in a Dream
Adam Moss: Let’s just start chronologically. How did this poem [“Song”] begin for you?
Louise Glück: I didn’t remember until I looked at those pages I sent you. But then I did recall something about its origins. There’s that piece of paper in the notebook that says, “Leo Cruz has white bowls, I think I must get some to you.” Those lines appeared to me in a dream. I remember waking up and writing them down and thinking, This is a gold mine. Though there’s nothing distinguished about the sentence. The language is very plainspoken. And of course it was altered in the final version. But I had a sense when I woke up that day that I had something on the line—some very large fish was toying with me under the water.

From “Waiting,” an interview with Louise Glück in The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

let's get lost

From the start of this poem you could hear Chet singing from the backseat, Let’s Get Lost…

killer lines

Killer first line. Killer final line. The rest of the poem will fall into place.

top-heavy

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

not part way

Don’t start this poem unless you mean to finish it.

start and finish

It was a great first line because of the poem or story that followed.

party crasher

Reader as party crasher: He liked it when the start of a poem was somewhat uninviting.

unentitled

Like any first words on the page, a title is a place to get started. The title shouldn't be considered sacred like a totem...it can be discarded at the whim of whatever words follow.

spark, spur, start

To find something in the inchoate to get the poem started.

soft start

The beginning was too benign.

where to begin

Knowing there was so much of the poet to read, I found it hard to start.

end or beginning

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

seen from a window

Sometimes finding the words is a matter of turning away from the page and looking out the window. Sometimes it requires leaving the building and going for a walk.

misdirection

The first line was a feint.

coat peg

The first line wasn’t special; more like a coat peg, just something to hang the poem on.

implies another mark

     Every time I set up a blank canvas or a blank piece of paper, I experience the same feeling—queasiness, something approaching panic, and a profound lack of self-belief. There are a limitless number of marks that could be made, and almost all of them will be mistakes. That is, they will set up a logic which will lead the picture to banality or pointless mimicry. For every mark implies another. Will that circle be repeated or answered by different shape? Will it be a sun, a plate, a face? That stuttering horizontal line—it’s the sea isn’t it? Or if it’s not, you’d better work hard and fast to make that clear. And so on.
     One of the reasons painters tend to develop a signature style and stick to it is that this helps answer the original panic. Some people will always begin with an image at the centre of the picture plane. It seems that Picasso mostly does this---a face, a bird, a group of figures, will shoulder themselves out of the centre, and the lines will press away to the edges of the paper or canvas. Other painters think very hard about edges, and work inwards. Oddly, because his pictures mostly involve a central shimmering block of colours, I think Mark Rothko probably painted that way. But an initial, bold decision about how to break up the picture surface, and—to put it banally—what will go where, helps any painter get going. And once you have a way in, you are likely to use it again and again; and that way in will hugely influence what’s going to happen next.

—Andrew Marr, A Short Book About Painting (Quadrille Publishing Ltd, 2017)

line tension

The first letter steps out slowly onto the tightrope of the ruled-line paper.