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'HOW PREDICTABLE THAT it has taken me such a long time to begin. How brutally predictable. Months after formulating a title, I reluctantly shared it with some fellow travellers by Wangi Falls, in the Northern Territory, when they wondered what name I had for my work. Even then, sitting in the tropical shade after swimming in those sacred falls, I knew I was in trouble. What a lovely title, they said. I agreed then as I agree now. It sounds lovely still when I say it aloud: The Beginning of the Poem. Everybody loves beginnings. And even if everybody doesn’t love poems, people generally seem to love the idea of them, an idea practically and theoretically intact at the poem’s beginning. What a grand and ambitious intention my title seems to express, what discursive evocations it seems to promise. And yet, on that day at Wangi Falls, I had known for months already that it was painful and often impossible to get started on this beginning. How could my work live up to its title? Although disappointing to me, it is perhaps fittingly bathetic that I should struggle to summon the will, and the skill, required to begin a work that is all about beginning.' (Introduction)
