How do you know when a poem is finished?
I don’t think it ever is. I know when I am in the home straight as that’s when I finally bring it to the laptop. Everything before then is on paper but when I find myself at a keyboard I know the words won’t really change much more and now I am looking at line, space, enjambment, shape on the page etc. That being said, I have long harboured the notion of one poem that re-appears in every book I publish, the latest showing of it reflecting where I am right now, and the cumulative versions tracing a line through my mind’s journey in words. One poem, Study of a Study of a Nurse, seems to fulfil that function as it is now due to appear in its third book; it is also one of those poems I ran out of the room to compose (?transcribe?) in a single setting so, make of that what you will. I do believe they are never truly finished. Even when a reader reads a poem and comes to their own conclusions that’s just one cul de sac of a blind tributary I have no knowledge of, or desire to influence, but the river they stem from flows on and I’m always immersed somewhere mid-stream (drowning in my own BS!)
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