How do you know when a poem is finished?
Many of my poems begin and end several years apart – so clearly, I’m unqualified to answer this. I often start a piece knowing roughly what I want to achieve. What takes me the time is trying to perfect the stuff sat between the opening and closing lines. It’s easy enough to see what needs doing; much harder to know when to stop. So my general rule is that if I leave a poem for six or twelve months, come back to it and find I no longer want to tweak it, it’s done. However, as gaps of four, five and even six years between inception and completion prove, poems typically take me a lot longer than a year to finish.
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