What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
The agonising last throes of finishing. I often 'finish' as I'm submitting to mags. So often, I'm there, already after numerous versions and edits, maybe after workshopping or showing friends, and then, as the deadline nears, and you're forced to really get into the minutia, suddenly the whole damn poem is populated with issues and you have to keep going over and over it. This can go on for days after you thought you were ready to submit. It feels like a kind of madness at that point. The easy, fun part is coming up with the idea and getting started. The creative rush is what I'm in it for, really. Then the work begins and I don't like work, it's just got to be done. Sometimes you don't manage to nail it for the submission. The poem gets rejected and you look at it again and say oh no, I can see now what's wrong and it's easy to fix. Some poems come together and get published with no sweat at all, but others ... I had a poem accepted for British mag, The Rialto, recently, which I'd been working on for about three years!
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