poll dance: step away from the poem
Published by Carolee July 15th, 2008 in Carolee, Discussion Thread, Poll Dance.
How do you know when a poem is finished? (And by “finished” I don’t mean “doomed;” I mean “completed.”) It’s a question every poet struggles with, and the possible answers are endless: A finished poem is one somewhere between “just started” and “beaten to death.” A finished poem is one that survives the trash bin. A finished poem is one that has done its job (from the poet’s point of view). A finished poem is one that has done its job (from the reader’s point of view).
Some believe the finished poem is a myth. They claim it does not exist. I tend to agree, and I like what French poet Paul Valery said on the matter: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” In my case, revision can be an unhealthy obsession; the desire for perfection is an ominous enemy. I am guilty of editing the essence right out of some pretty decent beginnings.
Others (some of them are good friends of mine) believe a poem is always finished, that it expresses itself fully in each moment. They hesitate to revise too much or at all.
As I am reminded again and again both in therapy and in life (isn’t it interesting when those two things tell the same story?), the truth is somewhere in the middle, in the gray area between the inspiration and the carving, between the sanding and the last coat of varnish. In the introduction of The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes writes, “[Sylvia's] attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.”
Most Read Write Poem-ers have declared 30-199 poems “finished,” whatever that means for them, and there is representation at both ends of the spectrum: those not being able to finish a poem and those finishing 1,000 or more.
Let’s talk about our definitions of “finished” and our processes for arriving at the finished poem. (I found a really terrific check list for revising your poems at a website of a private middle school in Washington State; you can also review January’s article on revision, just in case you missed it the first time around.) Let’s also talk numbers. For every “finished” poem you reported, how many are floating around your actual or virtual workspace “unfinished?” How many poems must a poet have before he/she’s prolific? Can a poet write too many poems? Is there a magic number of poems a poet should have before he/she considers assembling a manuscript?
~ Carolee
* * *
Here’s how the poll dance works: We post a poll and let it ride for a week and a half, and then I’ll talk a little bit about the topic and the results. The poll will stand for a few days after that to allow additional participation. The rotation gives each poll two weeks in the white-hot spotlight.
Loading ...
I don’t ever really see a poem as finished. If a poem finds a home, get’s publish on paper or website, I leave it alone. I congratulate it on finding someone who loved it enough and isn’t that what we all want? Isn’t that enough?
Someone loves you. Who am I do mess with that?
The ones who are still living under my roof? Those are fair game for revision. “Well, until you find a home, I’m going to nit-pick and waver. Change this, flip that. Send you out again.”
http://nibblepoems.wordpress.com
I revise! I like to revise! There is poetry in my files that was written in the late fifties and sixties. Some of it war protest, some of it pretty juvenile. That said I find inspiration in the thought expressed in the lines of my older work. I leave the original but put my experience and more mature grasp of wordsmith to the work. I view revision much as a cosmetic surgeon views a wrinkled crinkled sagging face. A nip here, a tuck there, a smidgen of botox, maybe a peel, now don’t you look pretty?
The nice thing about contributing to Read Write Poem is that it has given me a chance to dust off some long forgotten pieces (with a little surgical reformation of course) and respond to the prompts. Many times I can take pieces of different poems and provide a work.
One other thing that has my curiosity needing a dose of Beano: to how many people is Dana married?:-| I thought there was a law against that. Oh, Oh, Oh…I feel a poem coming on. Gotta go and did into my juicy poetry.
Regards,
DCH
Isn’t a poem finished when changing it makes it worse rather than better?
I tend toward abandonment. When something is good-enough, but not perfect, I am OK to let it go, especially if that thing inside me is no longer pushing itself onto the page. So although I was in the 200 range, a large number of those are not ones I would consider good - just finished. They being as finished with me as I am of them.
Like Donald, I have folders from other ages of my life. And I don’t feel an urge to revise the pieces that are pure teenage angst.
That said, revising is tough for me, my mind has trouble staying with the inspiration that drove the creation in the first place. It makes revising a poem easily turn into a complete take-over, with the words and phrases I like being co-opted to another effort.
Anyone else?
i liked yr… step away from the poem… it’s sorta like the send button on an email… you know that movie you’ve got mail.. where he hesitates to press the send button on the “Let’s Meet” email… i sorta run outta time… the creation creates and then sits there… sometimes in small whispers telling me to change a word a phase.. other times the poem hatches and flies away in moments… only recently started writing seriously… in the sense of writing it down making an effort to form something and let it go… in the case of a blog publish the poem.. rarely do i change a poem once i’ve published it… maybe for typos but that’s abt it… the poems i like the most are the ones that take the most effort… working for a few days attached at the hip always thinking abt it… sometimes the poem talks back to me and sez you coulda done this with that word instead of choosing that word…scolding that i didn’t take more time to caress the final… it is the discovery of words that form images and thoughts buried deep somewhere that is a part of me willing to express in the open… a sorta magical sense of freedom…
I have to confess, I ADORE editing and revision. Sometimes I read poems by other people, and revise them as though they were my own, just for fun. (I don’t share these, of course. That would be pretty rude.) I find it much easier to rehaul a piece with a good core to it than to come up with something with any material worth editing. That’s why I have so few finished poems. I probably have 20 proto-poems that never get worked on to every poem that I edit, and around 5-10 unfinished poems to every one I ever consider “finished”.
For me, “finished” means that if I read it in a book somewhere, I’d say “Damn, that was a good poem!” If I wouldn’t waste my time reading it again, I haven’t spent enough time writing it.
I have very, very few finished poems. And some that I once considered finished I end up trashing later anyway. I’d say that I have under 20 poems that I still like.
As for manuscripts, I wouldn’t know. I guess that’s the sort of thing that editors get a say in, but a book is so far from my mind right now.
I tend to write a lot. I wouldn’t consider any of my poems truly finished. I go by the mindset that if I write a lot, something good will come sometime around.
Which I really like some of the stuff I have been writing lately.
Here are the final results. Well, not results. But numbers based on reader responses:
If I gathered up all my finished poems (whatever that means for you), I’d have… (choose one!):
50-99 (23%, 13 Votes)
100-199 (23%, 13 Votes)
30-49 (19%, 11 Votes)
zero (I can’t finish a piece) (7%, 4 Votes)
200-299 (7%, 4 Votes)
1000 or more (7%, 4 Votes)
1-29 (5%, 3 Votes)
300-499 (5%, 3 Votes)
500-999 (4%, 2 Votes)
57 total votes