How do you know when a poem is finished?
Time and intuition. I tend to write quite quickly when I am writing, and by the time I reach the end of a poem it’s pretty close to its final form. Letting some time pass after finishing a draft gives me perspective and can reveal the possibility of evolution or recalibration, or bring certainty that the thing is done.
The passage of time also carries me away from the state in which a particular poem was created. I become someone new, and the poem remains the domain of the person I was, and there’s seldom anything I can do, or want to do, to it then. But time can also move in unlikely ways and shapes, in spirals or circles, and bring me back to a space or state of mind/being—for example, after finishing my book I went back and wrote a few new poems for the first section, which is mostly about gendered violence and trauma. In this case it “helped” that the patriarchy and white fragility never stop with their bullshit. It’s easy to follow their trails back to the triggered state I spent most of my twenties in, and write from that place, though it’s not a pleasant one.
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