Overtures and Cadenzas: An Experiment in Poetry Invention

When I was assembling my final collection in poetry school (colloquially known as an MFA thesis), I had a little scrap of a poem that I had written that clearly belonged in the collection but didn’t have an obvious place in it:

I’d rooted in despair all day			
                but found a maple leafed with gold:
the vision yanked my pain away		
                and left a ragged, hopeful hole—

After wrestling with it for a little bit, my advisor suggested making it a frontispiece poem, a piece that preceded but also framed the rest of the collection. It made sense: not only was the piece insistently fragmentary, with no title and that decisively irresolute closing dash, but it also did a lot to capture the major themes of my collected poems. That is, it didn’t have a place in the collection because, as it turns out, it was meant to stand apart from it, to welcome readers into it.