When is a Poem Finished?
When is a piece of writing done?
It depends. Are you a bundt cake baker or a Bletchley Park boffin (scientist) like Alan Turing trying to crack the enemy code and bring World War to an early conclusion?
I happen to be a bundt cake baker. I have no academic reputation to build or preserve. I’m wealthy in friends. I have a day job, sort of.
I’m not looking to transform my society or my language, or change how my fellow neighbors think about poverty, or poetry. I will go to my grave delighted with seven collections of poetry (at least) under my name in book form.
I write a poem like I’m baking a bundt cake. I mix all the ingredients and pour the batter into a formed pan, greased with butter. I pull the alleged cake out of the oven, turn the pan upside down and if it looks like a cake, I say it’s a cake. If it’s not a (plop) nicely-formed cake, I don’t try to turn it into a cake by putting icing on it. I don’t save up the scraps of failed cakes and then glom them together in the future (although that’s not a bad idea).
I’ve written roughly 400 poems in my lifetime. I have published about 20 of them in college literary magazines and regional literary journals. Two of my poems have been finalists for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize, and The Northern Virginia Review just named my poem “The Wasp Nest” the best poem of Vol. 33.
Of those 20 published poems, all of them have come out of my head fully-formed and intact. I have changed maybe a word or two.
Admittedly, a hundred of my poems have been rejected by literary journals, but statistically, that rejection has come from front-line screeners. I used to screen poems for The Greensboro Review as a graduate student, about 800 poems per issue. I know what it’s like to read a bunch of unpublished poems in one sitting; it’s numbing. The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock is going to end up in the reject pile half the time.
I watch as beginning writers attempt to fix a poem or a story by revising it, by following their own hunch or the “critique” of some informed peer writer, expert, editor or workshop leader. I see them remove a entire line or a word from a line, and completely forget that it’s in there because of a half-rhyme four lines earlier.
I’ve seen poets play a version of the game Jenga and remove the one word that holds the poem together. The entire thing collapses, and they don’t even know it.
My advice is: write more and revise less. Ray Bradbury (“Fahrenheit 451”) proposed that beginning writers write one short story a week for a year, insisting it’s impossible to write 52 bad stories in a row.
Ignore critics and trust your own instinct, your inner voice and your talent. The thing is done when you say it is.
Do you agree with me?
