How do you know when a poem is finished?
I think every poem has multiple finish lines.
When I write poetry, I like to sit down and get my thoughts out in one sitting. That would be what I would call the initially finished version of the poem. I manage to write a lot of those during the Poetry Marathons, hosted by Caitlin and Jacob Jans, and the Quarter Crazy Marathons, hosted by Amanda Potter.
If I stop writing half-way through a poem, when I come back, I often have lost the ambiance, the mood, the underlying mood, or the train of thought. All I can do when that happens is to let the poem sit, unfinished, somewhere in my computer, or in the notebook where it may have started. I go back over the incompletes to see if I can resuscitate any of them; sometimes I can, but many years may pass by.
When I do end up with an initially finished version of the poem, I go over it right away, changing one word here or there, changing line breaks, adding form, removing form. I do this until I feel like I can’t make any more changes. I call that being draft finished. I let the poem sit for about a week.
There are multiple edits I do to a draft finished poem, with a few days to a few weeks in between each one.
When I can’t see anything else that I should change to make the poem say what I want it to say, I call it finished and send it out to the world.
Even then, I have been known to alter one or two words of a so-called finished poem just before sending it out. I did that with my poem “Semicolon-ness”; the wonderful editors at the The Pine Cone Review included it in Issue 2 and nominated it for Best of the Net.
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