How do you know when a poem is finished?
I take this question to be about how you know when a poem is “done,” not a question about how you know where a poem’s ending is.
First, to repeat what many writers have said, knowing a poem is finished often costs time. You have to set it aside and become almost a stranger to it so that you can come back to it as its reader as much as--maybe more than--as its writer. Time buys you the chance to fall out of love with your own whimsy or cleverness, for instance, and if you’re smitten again, that’s a sign. And if you’re put off, that’s a sign, too. Of course, coming back to a poem once it feels less familiar also makes you aware of its troublesome gaps and/or heavy-handed excesses.
But I’ll add this. Once in a while, I can trick myself into that kind of remove--that readerly approach to even my newest writing--by pasting the poem into the body of an email addressed to a writer whose work I love. I don’t send it to them; I just borrow the jolt from seeing their name after “to.” And, magically, presuming on what I imagine to be their consciousness, their angle of vision, is enough. I can tell where the poem snags or misses, and I can fix it.
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