How do you know when a poem is finished?
I wouldn’t say I’m a great judge of when a poem is finished, but then I don’t think many poets are, and that’s why it’s good to have an editor.
In terms of my latest book, Grenade Genie, it was the title poem that needed an editor’s input the most. By the same the manuscript was accepted for publication by Fly on the Wall Press, the poem, Grenade Genie, had already gone through dozens of drafts over a number of years, and each time I’d think it was finished and send it out to magazines, and then, each time it was rejected, I’d belatedly realise it needed further editing but, still, I couldn’t get it quite right or sometimes simply made it worse. So, having Isabelle Kenyon, the book’s publisher and editor, look over it, and identify what she thought was the crux of the problem, helped immensely. She came up with various suggestions regarding the poem’s middle section, and once we sorted that out between us, everything else then came together. At any rate, since the book’s publication, the poem Grenade Genie has turned out to be the one that people often mention as being the piece they like very much or even the most, and alongside that, the poem has now, finally, got published in a magazine – the legendary counter-cultural publication, International Times, no less – so I guess I can say, with a fair degree of certainty, that the poem, Grenade Genie, is, at last, after many years, finished.
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