How do you know when a poem is finished?
That’s a tough one. To me, “finished” is sometimes an ephemeral sensation. It happens in so many ways. Sometimes, I agonize until I just can’t polish a poem any further and I have to force myself to walk away. Sometimes, it feels like the tuning of an orchestra— each refinement a twist of the strings until all the words, the line breaks, the punctuation, the shape, and the title sing together in harmony. Other times, I over-tune my poems and then I have to let them rest until I can see why it feels off. I then go back and loosen them up a bit.
Very rarely, a poem lands with clear certainty and I know that it’s there. It’s so hard to explain. As well, there have been times that a poem has felt finished, and then I picked it up again much later only to see that something clearly needed to change. I’m not sure if I really believe in finished. “Finished” feels closed and I always want to remain open to the possibility that I can take a poem farther. I will never be done growing and changing as a writer (at least I hope not— that’s terrifying to imagine) and so it makes sense that some poems might continue to evolve with me.
All that said, there are pieces that I can’t stand to spend another second contemplating. I think this is especially true for those poems that evoke an emotion I’d like to move past, or poems that declare things I no longer believe. Those can happily exist forever—just as they are—as far as I’m concerned. They’re sort of like that old lower back tattoo you got in college that you’re relieved you can’t see on a daily basis without a mirror.
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