How do you know when a poem is finished?
I have learned through painting that a work (mine anyway) will never be perfect, but there is a moment when it just feels done and there is the risk of overworking it. Sometimes a poem is finished because the structure says so, or because I am happy with the rhythm or the pace of it and it just feels, or visually looks, finished. I think it’s easier to know when a poem is unfinished, unresolved, or needs to have a big eraser attend to it.
Some of my poems are finished when I can no longer see them in the landscape. But they never are completely finished in the sense that they may be a moment in a conversation, a trace, a point on a line, a breath in a lifetime of breathing. Or they are floating somewhere still out there in the water, or decomposing in a pile of leaves. Like ecologies, these poems are always in process; increasingly I like poems that are unfinished, or somehow give the sense that they are in motion, or still speaking after I have finished writing/reading the words.
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