How do you know when a poem is finished?
I go through a few points of “completion” while composing a poem — when each stage of drafting is finished and when the poem itself is ready to share with others. I call drafting a completion, because as I’m loosing words onto a page I will inevitably reach a point of emptying. Everything I needed to say at that moment has been said and the poem in its rough, ungainly state is good enough for now.
Sometimes all a poem will need is a single draft along with some minor tinkering, sometimes this process of emptying myself is repeated multiple times as I figure out what the poem is meant to be (in some cases over a matter of years). Eventually, the poem will reach a stage at which I’m willing to send it out into the world, the point at which I suppose it could be called complete. This is governed in part by trust in my gut feeling cultivated through years of trying, failing, and trying again. Though, if I were to sum up what this feeling means, I would say that a “completed” poem has a kind of smooth roundness to it — the words, lines, imagery, beginning, and end all sitting comfortably within the curve of the whole.
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