How do you know when a poem is finished?
I know when a poem is finished when my coach/mentor says it is! To be less flippant, though, it’s finished when I stop thinking about it. Though many of my poems get revised months and even years later, and there is always potential for revision, I find that if I’ve stopped thinking about the poem, it’s done.
I think it also depends what we mean by “done”. As I often tell my students, there’s always room for improvement or clarity. This was especially true when I was editing my last book: I revisited each poem—all of which were “done” many senses of the word!—and worked on fine-tuning language, finessing line breaks, etc. Some poems did wind up almost exactly the same, and others did have some re-working where lines were re-worked or stanzas moved, taken out, etc. However, I’m not sure this counts as “finishing” because the idea(s) of the poems were not adjusted. If we consider “done” as “no changes, ever” then my poems are done when I have no more control over them. If we consider “done” as something else; as the idea is clear and it’s just a matter of execution, then I think it might be a different story.
No comments:
Post a Comment