Photo Credit: Melanie Little
How do you know when a poem is finished?
No idea! I don’t trust any of my assessments of a poem (is it worth keeping? is it worth revising? is it actually — gasp! — done?) until at least a good several weeks have gone by. After that, the self-congratulatory flush of creation will have faded, and I can take a colder, harder look at the thing. Even then, though, my judgment is always suspect.
I’m reminded of something that happened during the editing of my last book. It included a sonnet about a funeral home. The poem was ten years old and had been published in a journal; I figured it was more or less okay as it was. However, my editor, David Seymour, felt that the closing couplet needed work. Looking at the piece again, I agreed with him, but my proposed solution (as it often is) was that we simply delete the whole damn poem. David pressed; he believed the piece had something to offer, and a stronger ending could salvage it.
I reassessed. Maybe the problem was that the couplet was straining prematurely to wrap things up. So I shoved the couplet aside, got rid of the sonnet scheme altogether, and just started adding quatrains. I ended up with seven new stanzas and a forty-line poem that worked a lot better. All along, the issue hadn’t been the last two lines; the issue was an incomplete poem. For a whole decade I’d thought it was finished, when in fact it was barely begun.
I’m not sure there’s a point to that story, except to reiterate that I never really know when I’m done. And good editors are awesome.
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