How do you know when a poem is finished?
It's that feeling thing: that point when musicality and spareness of language can meet; when the poem says all it wants to say; when you don't tire of reading it, when you don't want to fiddle with it anymore. Perhaps the best way to check your thoughts on a poem is to put it away for a bit, then look at it with fresh eyes. The most fool-proof way of finding out if a poem is finished is to read it to an audience: if I do this, intuitively I can feel if anything is still not quite right - or if it is.
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