How do you know when a
poem is finished?
I’m
not sure that I ever know a poem is finished, as in “complete” (I can tell when
a poem is finished as in “dead”), and I’m always ready to open up a poem for
further tinkering. I resist the idea that a poem has an absolute terminal, a
Nirvana at which it arrives perfect and whole. That said, I often define
constraints or parameters for my writing. These help me decide when a poem is
sufficiently developed to start sharing, itself an experience which almost
always pushes the poem to grow further, beyond where I thought the conclusion
should be based on its parameters.
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