How do you know when a poem is finished?
When I was working on my forthcoming book, Wyoming, “finished” largely depended on if the new work was meaningfully adding to the work I had already drafted and was helping complete the “story” I was trying to tell. All the poems in that book are linked and build off one another, so the story of the collection felt equally as important as the poetics. In general though, I believe a poem is finished if it is emotionally, structurally, symbolically “true” to the moment in which it was written, and if I can still see that truth down the road. As a result, maybe strangely (naively?), I try not to look back at poems I have written once I have gone through many drafts and begin sending them out.
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