How
do you know when a poem is finished?
No idea whatsoever. I am a hoarder, and a slow
worker, and I somewhat compulsively return to old work to steal and/or revise.
It took a decade to produce Book of
Annotations, and given the absurdly small word count of the book, that
timeline is a bit ridiculous. For the book, I know they’re “finished” because
the book is on shelves now. If I hadn’t submitted the manuscript, or if it
hadn’t been accepted, I would undoubtedly still be fiddling with them. I rarely
send out work to magazines, and even if I did so more, I would still be
tinkering with the poems after publication. I’ m going to try to let the work
in Book of Annotations sit for a few
years to see how it settles. In the past I’ve been guilty of publishing too
much too quickly, and I always know it is too quickly because I regret the work
almost right away (often in the gap between submission and publication). I
rarely look at chapbook publications prior to the trade book for this reason. If
I can still stomach looking at a poem after six months, that’s a good step.
After two or three years, I’m thrilled. I want to see how the book holds for me
personally up in a decade or two.
No comments:
Post a Comment