How do you know when a poem is finished?
I think I first began writing poetry in part because it doesn’t ever have to be finished. (I wanted to be a poet as a teenager, quit and studied literature, and then came back to it after a neurosurgery that made it hard for me to sustain concentration during the months I was recovering. That was 10 years ago, but the sense that the most difficult expression is not sustainable in any linear manner has not left me.) Since poems don’t have the burden of narrative/exact meaning/sense-making, they can expand into indeterminate, unqualified, unclassified areas in order to deal/cope/consider the spaces where narrative/exact meaning/sense-making fail. For me, the supernatural thing about poetry is its ability to address fissure, breakage, excess, lack, interstitial space. That said, I don’t ever wonder if a poem is finished; it isn’t. It shouldn’t and can’t be.
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