How you know it's a good poem

I wrote "The Hand" on Saturday, sitting at a little table in the lovely Salon du The in Guelph (across from the Bookshelf -- try both). The door was at my back, too close, a cold draft swung in each time it opened. McKennitt on the stereo, one of her Morrocan-flavoured pieces. Cappuccino in a clay mug and organic chocolate chip cookie to dip into the foam.

But what made me happy was not the lovely moment but the poem. Twenty-eight words. I can easily count them in my head, even four days later. I suspect I'll be able to recite them for years. I began to vibrate with excitement, whispered to James "I wrote a poem!" ("That's good, dear.") I knew it was good from the first moment. You don't think so? I don't care. It's good, I know it.

Wish they came that way more often.

Part of the trick, perhaps: I carried the image with me a long time. Yes, I first heard it six years ago. But the seed of the poem occurred to me about two weeks ago. I jotted "glove" in my notebook, circled it, and left it like that. Let the poem take shape at the bottom of my head for a while before I tried to write it.

I learned at Sage Hill: take your time getting started. Jane Hirshfield says "don't say yes too soon." Franz Kafka posted it above his desk: "Wait."

Sometimes it works. You only get that first moment once. If the poem doesn't come then, it's much harder to get it to come, and perhaps it never has the same magic. (That's hard to know, as a poet, because to know you'd need to separate the experience of writing from the writing itself. (This is why it's good to put poems away in a sock drawer for a few months.) But certainly, you as a poet don't get to vibrate.)

Though good poems come from the wreckages of bad ones. See "Waste" as an example of a poem that's gone through many radical revisions, and incorporates the best of several unworkable poems.