How do you know when a poem is finished?
Everything is unfinished. It always is. I remember being outraged when learning that W.H. Auden said, or what somebody called Mallarmé said, a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. I took that to be an excuse for something worse than slovenliness. I've since come to agree with what he was saying.
In the practice of writing, or in at least one theory of language, you never can 'finish' a poem, if by 'finish' we mean fixed in place, once and for all, as if it had found an ultimate achievement beyond which you cannot possibly go. But you can never be done with the words and the shapes. I've come to think of the poem as something that is open and unrealized, immune to completion and resistant to perfection. I believe in trying to polish them, making them shine, but they're never finished, as in done and totally sufficient. I never feel that what I have written cannot be improved, or altered into another no-less accomplished version. It could always take a small or even large swerve in another direction. The sense of the poem as a done deed doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
So when are you “done”? The limits often are practical. You get tired; you haven’t the energies to take it further. You haven’t time: the editor wants, the publisher insists; you yourself have to get on with the quotidian pressures of your life; you have run out of ideas, words, impetus, inspiration, models; you have other things to write; nobody in her right mind (or a mind to her bank account) is going to publish your 2,000 page poem; you lose oomph, purpose: the damn thing wears down your hopes and spirits; you are depleted mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically; you are discouraged, defeated, can do no more; you are elated with what you have done, or at least pleased, you want to find a reader you have an idea what sorts of editors may wait lovingly or unlovingly on the other side of the door, readers too; what it is they will bless or curse?
You aren’t writing to god. You are a suffering, flawed mortal with your own dreams and limitations; you work in the sublunary world. You have to let it go at some point. You may have to learn to let it go.
These words at the end of my book Country Music:
I've done my best
no no there's no need for thanks
it is the least
i could do
it's not as if i thought
it was done
or anything
that there could be no more
not in the least
what can i say
that's the way things go
whether or not they are finished
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