Ava Hofmann : part one

Originally from Oxford, Ohio, Ava Hofmann is a writer currently living and working as an MFA student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She has poems published in or forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Fence, Anomaly, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, The Fanzine, Datableed, Peachmag, and Always Crashing. Her poetry deals with trans/queer identity, Marxism, and the frustrated desire inherent to encounters with the archive. Her digital chapbook, The Woman Factory, is forthcoming from The Operating System in 2020. Her twitter is @st_somatic and her website is www.nothnx.com

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Nowadays, I look at it visually on the page. There’s a really great visual art term known as horror vacui, which represents a tendency to not want to leave blank spaces in one’s work. In the moment of writing, I’m a fretful maximalist by nature; I want to be generous with my writing, provide as much of it as possible to a reader in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind. So, as a poem-architect, I have to be stingy; I need small portion sizes in order not to die from exhaustion (or overwhelm the reader too much). Thus, I turn to constraint. Like a visual artist, I choose size of my canvas before I even start to write. “Your poems in this series can only fit in a 3-inch-by-3-inch square.” “Your poems can only be 3 words long.” “You only have 5 seconds to write poem.” Etc.

An alternate answer is when it stops being a poem.