Matthew Kosinski : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

It’s a cliché to quote Valery on this subject, but he’s right: A poem is never finished, it’s only abandoned. So then the question becomes: When is it time to abandon a poem? 

And the answer, for me, is: When I’ve done all I can for the poem; when the poem’s needs have been fulfilled except for those needs that I am incapable of fulfilling. Because every poet is incapable of making the poem they set out to make; the poem that actually exists can only ever be an attempt at reaching some imagined poetic perfection. Ben Lerner puts it best in The Hatred of Poetry: “The poem is always a record of failure.” The trick is in recognizing when you’ve gotten the poem as close to the unattainable ideal as you can.

A metaphor to (hopefully) make it clearer. Say every poem starts as a tiny spirit in need of a body – some idea or experience or emotion that wants to exist in the world and needs to be rendered in language to have that existence. My job as the poet, then, is to make that body. The spirit/poem knows what kind of body it needs to live in the world. I’ve got to listen to it and shape a body that meets its specifications. But of course, I am not god. I can’t conjure a real, flesh-and-blood body ex nihilo. Best I can do is a sort of clay approximation. And when I’ve made the best damn clay body I can for my little spirit/poem, it can exist in the world as an independent entity. It no longer needs me (because I can’t give it what it really, truly, ultimately wants). 

And so I send it on its way and hope that, with every reader it meets, it gets closer and closer to that ideal. Because the readers, too, are part of the process of authoring the poem. The interpretations they bring to it, the encounters they have with it: All of that is part of the poem, too. It accrues like a constellation around the poem; it expands and enlivens the poem’s clay body, makes that body more supple, more pliable, warmer, more massive. Every reader, in this way, brings the poem closer to that ideal and receding state it yearns for.