Finishing poems

My sister-in-law Shari asked me this weekend how I could tell when a poem was finished. This question surprised me on several levels, first because, while Shari reads some of my poems, particularly the ones about our family or Georgetown, she’s not remotely interested in poetry. She ought to know better than to ask a question like that! Fortunately for her, I hadn’t formulated any sort of answer at all, so she got off the hook.

I swear that sometime in the last week or so I remember reading some author saying that her poem sparkles when it’s finished—there’s literally some spark of light and then she knows it’s done. I can’t believe I can’t find it again, because I haven’t had enough time lately to read much new stuff, but I can’t. At any rate, my poems definitely don’t sparkle when they’re done. Thank God.

I supposed that I judge whether a poem is finished based on the words and lines, which sounds most obvious and unhelpful. Are there any wrong words? Extra words? I always seem to have too many ands and thes. Is there at least one wonderful word in the poem? I had stooping, swift, and hurricane in the last poem I finished, all lovely words.

And the lines are often crucial to finishing as well. Sometimes when I just can’t figure out what is wrong with a poem, I will take out all the line breaks, run the poem together into one long paragraph, and break the lines an entirely different way. Then I can see if the words are wrong, or if something is missing or needs to be cut. The last poem I finished I actually have been revisiting for about seven months, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it until I finally realized that the poem needed to be in couplets. Now it’s done. That’s typical—a period of new writing, a long time looking, then finally understanding the problem and revising it. It takes quite a long time. Or I’m just slow.

I’ve been so busy lately I’ve written almost nothing new, which I hate, but at least I’ve been reading a good bit of poetry lately and have revised several things to completion. Or nearly so—I guess we’ll see in a few months. This morning I should be grading papers, but I’m going to send poems out instead. Time for a new round of rejections.