How do you know when a poem is finished?
When the words reach a state of equilibrium over their reference, when the words are at once faithful to the experience or emotion that prompted their arrangement and working to name an unestablished experience or emotion. Others might call this interplay of conflicting desires a contradiction or ambivalence, but I find the feeling I experience when language is torqued to this state better described by equilibrium. It goes without saying that I have no way of predicting or measuring this process. I just intuitively know when the words sing an experience new.
There’s another, perhaps more simple way of answering this question: I know a poem is finished when it has convinced me that it will survive anonymity, when the poem has made me feel sure it’ll speak to a reader without needing a disclaimer like you needed to be there.
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