by Carolee Sherwood

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?

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.