How do you know when a poem is finished?
I have a gut sense that the poem is finished, and this is especially true for me with poems that I think are really good. I’ll trot the poem out to my writing group, and the response I’ll get will usually confirm my own perceptions. That’s also true when I feel that the poem is unfinished, or has a weak spot, and it’s kind of exciting when others point to the exact spot I was concerned about because it tells me that I have a fairly well-developed sense of my own work, which is a great feeling.
Having said all of that, in some ways, I don’t know if a poem is ever really “finished”, because I think that as writers, we’re always hoping to perfect the work, and when we look back at our writing after a time, we might think: “oh, I wish I’d written that line differently” or “oh, I can’t believe I actually wrote that in that way”. So in a way, a poem is never really “finished”. It just reaches a point perhaps where you think: “ok, I’ve travelled with this poem long enough, and I can’t go any further”. It’s as “perfect” as it can be, and so out into the world it goes.
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