How do you know when a poem is finished?
I’m not sure a poem is ever finished, in terms of the writing/revision process; I think it’s more like hitting a pause button. I push a poem as far as it will go, or maybe as far as it will let me go, and at a certain point either have to halt changes or move on to the next piece. Some poems might be finished but behave more like archives for other poems; they don’t all necessarily wind up getting published. One of the reasons I love writing about long poems, as a scholar, is that they help us think about the ways in which poems refuse being finished—they might interlock with others, or double back on themselves, or pause and begin again, or play with fragment and interruption.
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