When is a poem done?
This article is for: Beginners and Intermediate poets
As you may have seen if you’re a regular visitor to The Poetry Place, I have several articles on the Creativity page about getting started writing. They include using short timespans, tackling fears that might blocking you, and reducing pressure on yourself so your creative mind feels happier and freer.
But as vital as getting started is, it’s not the only topic that matters!
It’s also critical to know how to handle the other end of the writing process—finishing a poem!
So in this article I’m going to address this question:
How do you know when to stop work on a poem?
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This is a question that’s most often asked by beginners, but it’s one that we all keep wrestling with no matter how experienced we get, because it has some profound implications.
Knowing the answer can be crucial to making a good poem.
Why stopping too soon—or too late—can harm a poem
Let’s start with a simple truth:
Poems are hard.
There are so many things going in them: meanings, sound techniques like assonance, rhythms, line breaks, tenses, syntax, imagery, and point of view, just for starters!
So I suppose writing a poem is a bit like building an extremely complicated car engine, where all the parts have to work together or the thing will explode…
OK, so a poem’s not actually going to explode. But still, if you don’t put the “engine” of a poem together right, it will fail to work—which means, it won’t have the effect on the reader that you’re looking for.
Given that, it’s definitely true that stopping your drafting process too soon can harm a poem a lot.
If you slap some words on the page and call it good, then you haven’t paid attention to all the complexity of poetry that I just referred to—meaning, imagery, sounds, etc. etc.
And chances are, there will be parts of the poem that don’t work yet. When someone reads it, they won’t get the message. Your pistons are out of sync and the engine has broken down!
In this case, you need to do more work.
Show the poem to some readers, get their feedback, learn more about the craft of poetry, and then try again to make the engine go. (This is what I do with poets every month in Poetry Parlor, by the way). Basically, keep going.
But it’s also possible to spoil a poem by drafting too much.
After all, didn’t W. H. Auden famously say (translating French poet Paul Valéry), “A poem is never finished, only abandoned?”
In other words, if you wanted to, couldn’t you keep fiddling with a poem for all eternity, changing a word there, a line break there, and making it better?
Well, it’s certainly true that you could keep working on the poem forever.
But all those improvements you think you’re making to your poem? All those cleverly-chosen adjectives, those additional images, that new stanza? Sometimes, those really aren’t improvements!
Sometimes, when we continue to work on a poem, we are in fact messing it up.
And there are a depressing number of ways in which you can do this:
Adding surplus information that the reader doesn’t need
Cutting out too much, so the poem isn’t clear
Accidentally taking out the most interesting part of the poem and focusing instead on something that fascinated you, but readers couldn’t care less about
Weighing the poem down with too many adjectives or too many images
Losing the spontaneous freshness of early drafts
And so on….
In fact, you may look back at your drafting process and realize (with gloom) that your best draft was 3 versions ago… or 5, or 20!
In other words, you had an engine that was working pretty well, and you hammered and tinkered until the oil started to leak and it froze up.
And all while you were certain you were tuning it up!
If it’s any reassurance, this can happen to the best of us.
Two poets who are famous for messing up their very good early work with later revisions are William Wordsworth and Charles Simic—two of the greatest poets of the 19th and 20th centuries respectively! Both revised their early work for later editions, and by general consent, made many poems worse—all while they thought they were making them better.
How the evolution of flight can help us
At this point, let’s take a little diversion.
I want to share with you a fascinating experiment I saw on TV years ago, and how I think it helps us with this question of when to stop work on a poem.
Some scientists were investigating how the wings of birds might have evolved. To this end, they set up a model of a wing with “feathers” that could be tweaked up and down, to change the shape and the aerodynamics.
A robot did the tweaking, following a semi-random computer program. After every tweak, they tested the wing’s new aerodynamics in a wind tunnel.
What they found was pretty cool. At first, the robot got the best results when it was programmed to make large tweaks. In this way, the model wing got pretty close to fly-worthy in not too long of a time. It looked mostly like a real bird’s wing too.
However, if the robot then continued to make large tweaks, the wing very quickly became useless, and looked like a bird that had been on the wrong end of a few tornadoes.
But if instead the robot was programmed to make progressively smaller and smaller tweaks, then the performance of the wing could keep on improving!
As the wing got closer to its perfect shape, small changes could still help.
But this was only true up to a certain point. There was still a sweet spot where, no matter how small its tweaks, the robot only ended up making the wing operate worse.
That is to say, the best result came from big changes at first, followed by increasingly smaller ones, combined with a definite stopping point.
Are poems wings?
You can probably see where I’m heading with this!
If poems work like wings, then surely we’re best off following the same process: big changes, then small changes, then STOP!
There will be a point beyond which all our “improvements” aren’t helping.
So, that was easy—and it’s probably what you do anyway.
BUT—are poems wings?
After all, a bird’s wing has a defined job to do, and how well it’s doing it can be tested and measured. And poems are more complicated than that, surely.
So, drat—my clever analogy breaks down. Back to square one we go…
Or does it? I’m not so sure, because
I think we do have an equivalent to the scientists’ wind tunnel: the mind of a reader.
While a wind tunnel can only do one thing, and a wing’s lift generation can only be measured in one direction, the mind of a reader is a hugely complex device that can measure and test all sorts of things, all at once. (Heck, maybe it’s even more complex than a poem!)
So we can use readers’ minds as our wind tunnel:
If the poem goes into the mind of a reader, and it doesn’t yet have the effect you want it to have, then the poem needs more work.
And equally, if the poem does have the effect you want it to have, then it’s time to stop drafting.
So is this the answer? Make a poem, have people read it, and use their feedback to find out whether it’s working?
Yes!—and no.
The complication here of course is whereas all wind tunnels are more or less alike, human minds vary infinitely! So while one reader might like a poem, another might hate it.
Therefore, your spouse or partner or neighbor or mother might think your poem is hot news—but every editor you send it to might nonetheless reject it!
So, you do need to consider carefully who you think of as your “wind tunnel.”
Make it people who know about poetry, who understand the kind of poetry you want to write, and who know how to give you clear, useful feedback on how you can make your poem better.
These people, whoever they are, are hugely important in your poetic life: they are your wind tunnel.
If they say it’s good, then you can call the poem done. If they can’t find any problems you need to address, then you can stop. Phew!
Even then, a poem that your wind-tunnel readers like may still be rejected many times by other readers and editors. But I suggest not worrying too much about this: it will never be possible to make a poem that pleases all readers all the time—so don’t drive yourself up the wall by trying.
And if, over time, you find that you’re not getting the recognition for your poems that you want, then maybe it’s time to “power up” your readers, by seeking out someone who’s more knowledgeable and more experienced. (My Critique Service is a way to do this.)
In these ways, I believe we can still make my “wing” idea work.
So, when is a poem finished? When readers you trust tell you it works.
Yes, you could fiddle forever—but you’d be better off making some more poems instead.
Next Steps
Find a poem that you think might be finished, but you’re not sure.
Maybe you’ve said all you wanted to say, or all you can think of, but you’ve got some nagging doubts about it.Give the poem to 2-5 readers whose opinion on poetry you respect.
Note that these may not be the people who are nicest to you about your poems! You need honest feedback to help improve a poem, not reassurance. (Wind tunnels don’t lie!).Listen to what the readers say about the poem, and maybe ask some questions about their experience too.
There are dozens you might ask, but here are some that might help.
—Did you understand the poem, both as a whole and all the parts of it?
—Did the poem move you?
—Did you feel there was an overall meaning or message? What was it?
—Did the parts all seem to contribute?
—Was the reading experience fresh and exciting? (If not this probably means you need to spice up your language and imagery.)
—Did the form add to the experience of reading, or was it an obstacle? Or neither?Use your reader’s feedback to see what stage the poem is at.
If they bring up big things, like the overall message being unclear or parts of the poem not working, then you probably need to make big changes.
If they bring up small things, like a line or image here or there not working, then you probably just need small changes.
If they can’t find any significant faults, OR if they veer off into what the poem has made them think of, that means the poem is done, and you can STOP!
And after you make changes, remember to give the poem back to the readers for another check—to see if you really made improvements.
