How do you know when a poem is finished?
I am of two minds on this. The first being, a poem is done when I’ve got sick of working on it. And oddly enough, this does happen fairly often enough. The second mind being that I am not all too sure that a poem is ever done. The great American Pacific Northwest poet Richard Hugo proclaimed that he was always writing the same poem. And this was a good thing. I could argue that’s the case with me. A lot of my work operates in a sort of overarching discussion of decolonization and often engages the concrete in a way that shows off its multitudes. Meaning a poem that looks at cattails or ahpawiak has so many was of exploring its connections to creation that it requires more than one poem could every hope to. In this second way, I might be trapped in that Wallace Steven’s poem without any hope of escape.
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