How do you know when a poem is finished?
I’m not sure you ever do, but the more you engage with poetry as a reader and writer and – if you’re fortunate – as an author, the more you get a feel for when a poem might be finished. A combination of instinct and experience, I suppose. But it’s not an exact science, and I’ll often find myself wanting to ignore what my gut is telling me just to be done with a particular poem. If I decide a poem’s finished, but the piece itself has other ideas, it’ll quietly nag at me until I work out what it wants. Once I’ve figured that out, the poem goes into a drawer for a while I write others and/or make collages. This gives me a chance to look at each poem with a fresh eye later on and make any eleventh-hour adjustments.
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