When is a Poem (or a Short Story) 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 and potentially save millions of lives?
I happen to be a bundt cake baker. I have no academic reputation to build or preserve, no publish-or-perish sword of Damocles hanging over me.
I’m wealthy in friends and in time. I have a day job, well half of one, sort of. I have everything I need materially.
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 fifteen collections of poetry (at least), independently published on Amazon.
I write a poem like I’m baking a bundt cake. I preheat the oven. I mix the ingredients and pour the batter into a formed pan, greased with butter. I bake my cake at 350 degrees for 53 minutes, on the middle rack. After I pull said cake out of the oven, I flip the pan upside down and if it looks like a cake, I say it’s a cake.
If it’s not (“plop”) a 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 for a future cake (although that’s not a bad idea).
I’ve written roughly 500 poems in my lifetime. I have published about 20 of them in college literary magazines and regional literary journals. Three of my poems have been finalists for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize, and The Northern Virginia Review 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 in a matter of minutes. I have changed maybe a word or two.
Admittedly, hundreds of my poems have been rejected by literary journals, but that rejection has come from front-line screeners, not the actual editors of those journals. I know this because 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 I know what it’s like to sit down on a Sunday morning in an unheated apartment and read a bunch of unpublished poems in one sitting; it’s numbing.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 more than half the time. Billy Collins and Mary Oliver are going home in the SASE envelope, with a haiku-length rejection slip: We loved your work (but actually, we didn’t).
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.
This essay originally appeared in Laying Low (2021).
Photo credit: author, Nevada City, CA
