According to W. H. Auden, a poem cannot
be finished: it is simply abandoned by a poet who can add no more to it. This well-known
statement is, on many levels, quite true. It doesn’t, however, offer much help
when it comes to a poem that, up to a point, does pretty much what you want it
to but, then, defies the perfect ending. There’s a lot to be said for “finishing” a
poem.
This “prompt” is about some of the
things you might try when you’re working on a poem and can’t quite pull it all
together. I thought that you might find it
interesting to read what some of my favorite poets and good friends have to say
about their own “dismount” processes.
Following are suggestions that we hope you’ll find helpful. I send my
sincerest thanks to all the poets who contributed and have included a link to one
of each of the poet’s books, all of which are in my personal library and which I recommend highly! Most of these poets have more than one book to their
credit, some are writing professors, some are journal editors and publishers, and at least one is a book publisher, so you may want to Google them individually for more info on their work and for examples of their poems. I've also included links to places where you can visit them online.
1. Charlie Bondhus
Author of All the Heat We Could Carry
Click Here to Order Charlie's Book
Ending an unruly poem can often
be a challenge. The first question you might want to ask is “did the poem end a
stanza or two ago?” Chop off some lines and see what happens. Another option is
to try shuffling your stanzas. Swapping the first and last stanzas might be a
good starting place. If cutting and shuffling don’t work, try simply putting
the poem aside for a bit—days, weeks, months. When you return to it, the ending
might smack you right in the face. All of the above strategies have worked for
me at some point or another.
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2. Dean
Kostos
Author of Rivering
The first thing I look for in the
ending, whether it evaporates quietly or sounds off with a tad ah, is: Does the ending feel earned? Has the poem arrived there
organically? A powerful approach to ending a poem can be the non-sequitur
ending. An example of this is Thomas James’s haunting poem, “Mummy of a Lady
Named Jemutessonekh.” (Note: to read “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutessonekh,”
click on the link below.)
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/mummy-lady-named-jemutesonekhxxi-dynasty
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3. Gail
Fishman Gerwin
Author of Crowns
“If at first you don’t succeed . .
.” Sometimes this old adage simply does not work. If I have created a draft to
which I return again and again, tweaking to my internal standards with
satisfactory content and a dismount that pleases me (and hopefully a journal),
I’ll see the poem through to the end. If I cannot rework, rearrange, redraft,
or release a poem, if I don’t wake up with the desire to return to my ideas
with the appropriate words, I feel free to reject it and toss it on the “tried/failed”
pile. Permission given not to “try, try, again.”
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4. Penny Harter
Author of The Resonance Around Us
Note: Scroll Down to The Resonance Around Us
How I end a poem is not usually a conscious decision. However, I do
know that I want my poems to take a turn toward (or at) the end, similar to the
turn in a good haiku. At the heart of haiku is the juxtaposition of two images
or ideas across a kind of “spark gap”. And these images connect in a way that both
startles and seems inevitable. When I look back at poems I wrote some years
ago—or even at occasional recent work—I find myself saying, “Well, I like the
imagery, or the sound, rhythm, theme, etc., but if I reach the poem’s end
and it hasn’t gone anywhere, hasn’t
taken me from here to there (wherever here and there are), it doesn’t satisfy
me.” For me, writing a nice representational poem doesn’t feel like enough.
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5. Gina Larkin
Author of When the Gods Play Hide and Seek
Honestly I have found that what works best for me is to put the poem
away and just not look at it for at least 7 to 10 days - then read it and see
what happens. I also sometimes read it backward (bottom to top) - this can make what
you are trying to say clearer. Share it with a trusted friend and listen to
what he/she says.
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6. Diane Lockward
Author of The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement
There’s help
for the poem that ends with a whimper instead of a bang. Please don’t ever let
your poem go until that ending is fixed. The poem might be able to tolerate a
weak line or two earlier but not at the end. Sometimes, however, the problem
isn’t that you haven’t yet written the ending. You have written it, but it’s in
the wrong place.
Here’s a
strategy that I’ve found helpful. I go through the draft (it’s still a draft
until the end is just right), and I mark my strongest line. I move that line to
the very end of the draft. On a computer this is easy to do. You will most
likely have to do some revising to the nearby lines so that the new ending
works. You may need to add additional lines. I love this part of the process.
All kinds of new possibilities open up. And in all likelihood, your poem now
ends with an image instead of a piece of information.
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7. Michael T.
Young
Author of The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost
I’m going to give the advice
about this that I believe is the hardest to hear: be patient. And by that
I mean: put the poem down and forget about it for a while, maybe months.
Over those months, go back to it, read through it and see if the closing lines
come. If they don’t, put it away again. I had the beginning of a
poem that I was very happy with, but I couldn’t get the ending. I had
that beginning sitting around for almost 2 years. Every once in a while, not
every time, but every once in a while when I went to my notes for poems, I
would return to those lines, read through them a few times and see if I could
hear the next lines. For almost 2 years I didn’t. But then, one
day, bing!—they started coming. And when they came, I was able to
complete the remainder of the poem in a one-hour lunch break. But all in
all, it was about 2 years.
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8. Emily Vogel
Author of First Words
When a poet brings a poem to a
close, it does necessarily have to be “conclusive,” or even resolute.
Organically, the poem closes when you feel a settling in your “soul,” whether
or not as editor of your own poem you believe that this is how a poem is “supposed”
to close. You may even feel that there is “supposed to be” more to say in order
to make it seem like a “wrapped box,” so to speak. Sometimes the box needs to
remain somewhat unwrapped, and that leaves your reader in suspense, and that is
from where Keats’ idea of “negative capability” derived.
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9. Joe Weil
Author of The Great
Grandmother Light: New and Selected Poems
If the ending seems too neat, it probably is. A too tidy
ending is like a bad comic smirking before the punch line, or a boxer
telegraphing his punch. Or better still, is like one of those grief counselors
who nods his or her head in “active listening” and “professional empathy” and
tells you you’ve achieved “closure.” The best way to know when to end is to
listen and look at your own poem several times. If the last few lines are
somehow longer or shorter, or differently structured than the rest of the poem
then you’re either coming to the end or your going off on a tangent and
beginning a new poem (some poets often have two poems going and don’t know it).
Beware of forcing the shoe to fit by cutting off the toes. Avoid loving your
sense of symmetry so much that you impose it on your own creation even when it
screams for mercy. Know your intention, your theme, and what your effect might
be on the reader, and if all three seem accomplished close it out. If not, wait
and be patient and don’t be afraid to try several endings. Also know that
sometimes a poem ends rhythmically before it ends in any other way. In this
case, go back, and edit so that the rhythm doesn’t have such a dying fall.
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10. And ...
If you read this blog often, you’ll recall that I often suggest that you:
- be wary of tying your poem up in a neat little package at the end,
- avoid the pitfall of simply summarizing what is already contained in your poem,
- take care not to undercut your poem’s authority by ending with trivia or a “so what” line that doesn’t make your readers gasp,
- make a point of concluding your poem in a way that points toward something broader than the body of the poem; in other words, give your readers a “dismount” that leads them to discover something subtle and rich, something that resonates for them even if it isn’t exactly what you had in mind when you started writing. (I think of Seamus Heaney’s lines here, “Since when,” he asked, / “are the first line and last line of any poem / where the poem begins and ends?”)
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Practical Application:
1. Now … and here’s the challenge
for this week … take a look at three of your own poems (completed or in
process).
2. Read the poems carefully and
think about your closing lines. Are they really the dynamite dismounts they
should be?
3. If your answer is “no,” think
about the suggestions above and see what you can do to bring your poems to
better closure.
4. Marianne Moore wrote, “I tend to like a poem which instead of culminating
in a crescendo, merely comes to a close.” Think about that and what it might
mean to some of your poems.
Additional Resources:
1. https://cambridgewriterscollective.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/what-makes-a-good-ending-to-a-poem/
2. http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_boruch2.php
What a great idea! It's good to read what other poets feel about bringing their poems to closure.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to see that a few suggest leaving the poem for a while and coming back to it later. (Bravo, Michael T. Young on finishing your poem after 2 years -- I'll bet it was worth the wait.)
Thanks for your comment, Jamie! So glad you enjoyed the post!
DeleteThis is so good, full of meaningful and helpful insights. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Amita!
DeleteThe poem brings you, the poet, to its so-called resolution and that can take weeks, months, years even. No prompt can make it happen. Only waiting and listening.
ReplyDeleteI agree that waiting and listening are integral to finding effective closure for a poem. However, I get the sense that you suggest prompts (including this one) have no value, and I disagree with you strongly.
DeleteIt will be interesting to see what the students do with this. They tend to want to finish all of their writing assignments immediately.
ReplyDeleteI remember that from my own days as a teacher! I hope they found the post meaningful!
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