Prompt #352 – Writing Prose Poems

Although we’ve explored the subject of prose poems in the past, I thought this might be a good time to revisit the subject as we struggle with a “new normal” (that isn’t limited to any specific geography and applies to all of us). I’ll begin with a reprint of an article I wrote for the most recent issue of Tiferet Journal (Spring/summer 2020). 

For this prompt, imagine that you’re not writing prose, and you’re not writing poetry. You’re writing neither and both at the same time! It's a little like two wings that work together to make a prose poem "fly." So ... relax, let the words flow, and go wherever your prose poem leads you. (If the spirit moves you to write about the current Covid situation then, by all means, "fly" with it.) Once you’ve edited and refined your work, you might even find an online journal, print journal, or anthology for your poem.

______________________________________________________

Prose Poems: One Foot in Prose, the Other in Poetry
By Adele Kenny

Reprinted by Permission from Tiferet Spring/Summer 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by Tiferet Press. All rights reserved.

To view the complete Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Tiferet free of charge, click here.

In recent years, prose poems have appeared more and more often in mainstream journals, anthologies, and books. There is justifiable fascination with a form that challenges readers with a name that seems contradictory if not downright oxymoronic. How can a piece of writing be both poetry and prose at the same time?

In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.” A fusion of poetry and prose, the prose poem commits completely to neither.

While prose poems are not defined by the line breaks (lineation) typically associated with poetry, they maintain a poetic quality and necessarily use techniques common to verse. A standard prose poem is one that resembles prose in structure (paragraph form), but moves away from customary prose techniques in favor of poetry-like imagery and/or emotional effect. Prose poems may vary in length from a single paragraph to more than a page. Their lines break with the margins and, significantly, their margins are justified (left and right whenever possible). Thus, they appear in blocks of language (or as “language in a box”).  

The prose poem’s allegiance to poetry is unmistakable in sonic impression, compression, internal rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and figures of speech. Although prose poems appear as paragraphs, they lack the narrative structure of prose. Characterized by complete sentences and deliberate fragments, they are often driven by metaphor and imagery, and they sometimes speak the dialect of dreams. Prose poems generally include unexpected juxtapositions and startling twists of language. Based in reality, they often give a nod to the surreal.

Importantly, prose poems should make sense despite the fact that they are often presented through highly poetic language and almost always stretch the boundaries of poetry and prose. A confusing mishmash of words, however, is not a prose poem (at least not what might be termed a good one). By the same token, a prose poem is much more than a narrative story told in a generic way; there is always a strong element of surprise in the language, always something unpredictable. Too often, inexperienced poets assume that a prose poem simply tells a story, and many amateur prose poems read like diary entries or travel journals. Often confused with flash fiction and mini-memoirs, they are distinctively neither.

Historically, the prose poem is not a new concept. There are, arguably, prose poems contained in such ancient texts as the Bible, but prose poetry is most recently related to the haibun, a Japanese literary genre that became popular during the 17^thcentury. In most haibun, short poetic prose passages (paragraphs) are followed by haiku. Haibun are not exactly prose poem prototypes, but there is a relationship in the blending of prose and poetry, as well as a similar affective sensibility.

Western prose poetry emerged in the early 19^th century as a rebellion against traditional poetic structures. Symbolist poet Louis-Jacques-Napoléon “Aloysius” Bertrand is credited with introducing prose poetry into French literature in 1842 with Gaspard de la Nuit. In 1869, Charles Baudelaire published Petits Poèmes en Prose (Little Poems in Prose) and gave prose poetry its name. The form was firmly established in France by Arthur Rimbaud (Illuminations, 1886) and Stéphane Mallarmé (Divagations, 1897).

Throughout the 19^th century, poets continued to experiment with prose poems, which remained popular into the 20^th century and enjoyed a mid-century renaissance of interest during the 1950s and 1960s. Several distinguished American poets of that era wrote prose poems, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Robert Bly, to name a few. In 1989, Charles Simic won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End.

Over time, individuals and groups of writers have adapted the form and developed their own rules and restrictions, ultimately widening the parameters of prose poem form.  Other prose poets involved include (among many others) Paul Fort, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Patchen, John Ashbery, and Mark Strand. However, prose poetry was not embraced by all. T.S. Eliot contested the form and argued that it lacked the rhythm and musical patterns of verse; he did, however, write one published prose poem called “Hysteria.”

It may be said that the prose poem is not yet, and likely never will be, defined by a specific “method.” That is, a “prescription” for writing prose poems is elusive at best. Prose poet Russell Edson stated in his essay “The Prose Poem in America” (published by Parnassus in 1976), “… for all the interesting poets who have written them, the prose poem has yet to yield up a method.”

Today, prose poetry is developing a 21^st century character. It remains uniquely neither poetry nor prose but is fundamentally a hybrid of the two, and is widely considered its own genre. Because prose poems do not function in a linear, logical manner, some may seem, at first blush, to be rather “odd.” They frequently require considerable thought and, more often than not, they mean much more than the words they contain. For poets who embrace the form, prose poetry is both a challenge and a delight that takes poetic art into a singular area of aesthetic expression.

Examples:

From the Semi-Annual Cross-Stitch Conference, Savvy Stitch

By Rogan Kelly

The bird died on a Thursday. She held it all night like an egg. Next morning, she packs the car with the bird in a cooler, wedges it in the middle console and drives to a conference in Jersey. Others went to dinner. She returns to the room where the winged body rests by the window: a grey vase of tulips on the sill beside. She pulls strips of lettuce from a turkey sandwich, collects part of the crust from the bread. And when she speaks to the empty room, her voice is the faint rusted creak of a half-hinged storm door before the wind picks up.

Wisdom in a Crayon

By Gary Szelc

                    (for Eleanor)

          My daughter, my daughter, did you leave me a page in my notebook?

At last, I find an empty sheet, and begin to write. But then, when I turn the page on my written thoughts, a childish scrawl reveals indigo streaks of a magic universe where the curve of an angel’s wing unfurls to one side and flutters in a breeze. On the page before my discourse, a rainbow horse swirls over a fuchsia tinted sea. Elsewhere, a purple forest and orange fruit surround a curious red spider (or octopus) or perhaps a swinging orangutan. There is marvel after marvel in this museum-quality exhibit of imagination—so much wisdom in crayon. So much that I tear out the page with my once pithy words.

Nuthatch

By Ray Cicetti

I watch it fly across the yard, carrying sunrise on its back, then land upside down on the sugar maple, wings tucked in like a teaching, only to disappear into the dark woods, like a small blue god's visitation. How I want to follow it, praise it, cup its soft fierceness in my hands.

I step into the moment, arms outstretched, and secretly become a bird. I breathe in autumn's fullness and turn in the crisp air.

The morning lifts me like wings over charcoal roofs. I warm my lined face with my hands, far away from the poverty of knowing. Awake as I will ever be.

Where He Hangs My Hat

By Bob Rosenbloom

If I begin to wear a hat, it could mean that an old Jew—not just any old Jew, but my father, a sweet, old Jew—has gained ground and overtaken my body. He’s begun to enter my soul. His hand has entered my hand through a gaping hole at the wrist and begun to write the rough draft of this poem under another title. We had so many heated arguments across the kitchen table. Only the food cooled off. I defended Al Sharpton. Dad kept the right wing flapping. We were pig-headed, stubborn. Mom refereed and sent us to our rooms when she had enough. Maybe my father has forgiven everything: dropping out of school, smoking pot, being named in a Brooklyn College lawsuit against SDS members. I did nothing wrong. It’s been decades. All the witnesses are gone.

Waiting for Ed McMahon
By Laura Boss

Ed McMahon, today is January 24th and I am sitting here waiting for you.  I am waiting for you to bring me ten million dollars. You sent me a letter two months ago with my name on the envelope in two-inch letters saying I was a winner—or at least that's the way it looked until I read it a second time. But then it seemed that I still had a really good chance of your giving me ten million dollars if I would just get my envelope back to you on time—especially if I affixed the gold sticker with the number 10 million correctly though it was hidden among all the magazine subscription stickers and to even further my chances I took a subscription to a magazine I didn't especially want, and Ed McMahon, I stuck that sticker on so carefully and even checked that I wanted my payment in one lump sum rather than monthly installments, and yes, I checked that I'm willing to be televised when you hand me that check for ten million dollars.  And because I was getting my letter back to you so fast, Ed McMahon, I stuck the bonus Jaguar sticker on its special card in my choice of green though I hesitated for a few seconds over the red one. And I left my calendar free for today—no free lance workshops (not that I have them everyday though I wish I did so I wouldn't be waiting so desperately for you today, Ed McMahon). Ed McMahon, I am sitting here waiting for you. I am waiting for you to bring me my ten million dollars.

 

The Beef Epitaph

Michael Benedikt

This is what it was: Sometime in the recent but until now unrecorded past, it was decided by certain ingenious and commercially forward-looking cattle-ranchers in a certain large, modern Western nation which prides itself on being nutritionally forward-looking, that since people are increasingly nutrition-conscious, and increasingly insistent that “you are what you eat,” all cattle on the way to market were to be marked with brief descriptive tags noting the favorite food of each animal; and also stating approximately how much each ate of it. This, it was felt, would both delight the diner and comfort the nutrition-conscious consumer: people would be able to tell exactly what kind of flavor and texture of beef they were purchasing beforehand, and always be able to secure exactly the kind of product most likely to delight their taste, since they would know a whole lot more than ever before about the quality and kind of nourishment which the animal had received (it was a little like our own, well-established, present-day modern American system of catering to preferences for light and dark meat in chicken—by supplying each part shrink-wrapped in a separate bag in the supermarkets). The system set up by those ingenious and commercially forward-looking cattle-ranchers was remarkably efficient; and seemed—at least at first—to be destined for success. This is how it worked: First, on each animal’s last day on the ranch, they attached the main, or so-called “parent” tag—made out according to information provided by each rancher, or their hired hands, or even (in some cases) their immediate family—to each head of livestock. The information contained on each tag would be of course be definitive, since it was compiled just before the two or three days required for shipment of the animal to the slaughterhouse—during which travel time, of course, the animal customarily doesn’t eat anything, anyway.... Once at the slaughterhouse, they carefully removed the “parent tags”; and during the slaughtering, mechanically duplicated them numerous times, preparing perhaps hundreds of tiny labels for each animal. Immediately afterwards, at the packing plant, these miniature, or “baby” tags were affixed, respectively to the proper bodily parts—each section of each animal being separately and appropriately tagged, each as if with an epitaph. But then something went wrong with this means of delighting the diner, and of comforting the nutrition-conscious consumer. At first, quite predictably, the tags came out reading things like “Much grass, a little moss, medium grain” and “Much grass, much grain, generally ate a lot.” And this, as one might expect, proved (at least at first), a great pleasure to purchasers! But then tags began coming through reading things like “A little grass, a little grain, many diverse scraps from our table”; and “She was our favorite pet—gave her all we had to give”; and there was even one (featured at dinnertime one evening on network television news) which was tear-stained and which said, in a child’s handwriting, “Good-bye, Little Blackie Lamb, sorry you had to grow up—I’ll sure miss you!” And so, gradually, despite its efficiency, this system somehow ceased to delight the diner, and comfort the nutrition-conscious consumer. And this is how the practise of The Beef Epitaph became generally neglected over the course of time; and how the members of a large, nutrition-conscious, and otherwise generally quite sophisticated modern nation very much like our own, came to eat their beef—as indeed they still do today—partially or even totally blindfolded.

From Night Cries, published by Wesleyan University Press, 1976. 
Copyright ©1976 and Copyright © 1999 by Michael Benedikt. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Laura Boss, Executor of Michael Benedikt’s literary estate.

Writing Prose Poems

First Try:

1. Go for a walk or find a quiet place to think and ponder some memories or experiences. Free-write for a couple of pages. Follow leaps of thought that catch your attention.

2. Read through what you wrote and highlight a few phrases that have special meaning for you (not too many).

3. Think about the emotional center of what you’ve written—this will become the emotional center of your poem.

4. Use selected portions of your free-write as the basis for a one-paragraph prose poem (be sure to vary your sentence length and structure).

5. Incorporate at least two striking images.

6. Include internal rhymes and slant rhymes, alliteration, or other poetry devices. Be sure to work on these as you write, or during the early stages of revision.

7. Cut out anything that is not essential. Do this increasingly strongly as your revision progresses.

8. When you feel you’re close to a final draft, read your prose poem aloud to yourself. What do you hear? Is there a definite “sound quality” to your poem? Does your imagery strike and stun? Have you nodded to the surreal? Have you incorporated both complete sentences and deliberate fragments?

Second Try:

1. For starters, think in terms of a single paragraph as your goal for this prose poem. Approach your subject knowing that you won’t be concerned with meter, stanzas, or line breaks. Your prose poem will take the shape of a paragraph (think “box,” and be sure to justify both the left and right margins when you type your poem). Remember to include complete sentences and sentence fragments.

2. For content: think about a particular image that remains clear in your memory.

3. Now think about how that image entered your memory. Where were you?  Was anyone with you? What happened? How did you feel?

4. Write a paragraph based on the image and about the experience. Bear in mind that your poem’s “muscle” will lie in the strength of your sentences. You will need to express thoughts and subtleties in ways that might be hampered by line breaks.

5. Pay particular attention to poetic devices (simile, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme, repetition, onomatopoeia, symbolism). Focus on describing the images and your feelings.

6. You may tell a story, but remember that the storyline is second to the language you use to tell it. There are two caveats.

     A. Your prose poem shouldn’t read like a diary entry.

     B. Be careful not to go over the top with poetic devices and poetic language.

___________________________________________________

Stay safe and well, my dear blog friends!

When Is a Poem Finished?

 

My most current manuscript, which I called “completed,” sat on my desk for well over a year. Every time I picked it up, I found something to change; at readings, I heard things that didn’t sound quite right, and I made more changes. Happily, my publisher accepted the manuscript a week or two ago, and the last nerve-wracking round of edits is nearing completion—I mean, it is, isn't it? 

It’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking about Paul Valéry’s statement that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. At what point does a poet stop and say, “This poem is completed.” I can’t remember ever consciously doing that, and my question is, “Exactly how does a poet know when to stop writing and editing a poem?”

For me, poems are ideas with wings—they move about quite a lot, and the fluttering usually generates a need to see where they want to go—the process takes me with it and it takes time. I try to give my poems a lot of time and space. Most often, I put a poem aside after several drafts and come back to it later (sometimes much later—I actually found one last week that I started in 2006 and “lost”). In most cases, my imagination is a step or two ahead of me, and I keep going back, putting aside, and going back again. Drafts and redrafts can number in the dozens for me, and I still find myself viewing the work from different angles and making changes. First and last lines are usually the most challenging—how to enter and leave a poem—how to invite the reader in and what to leave with the reader.

I have to admit that when I re-read my published poems months or years after publication, I’m sometimes horrified to think I let them go into the world as they are, and I edit them on their pages in the books or journals in which they appear. I thought I was a little weird about this practice until I read that Robert Lowell was famous for revising after his poems were published and even took his pen into bookstores where he edited right there.

The best strategy I’ve discovered is to read poems in process aloud to myself because it enables me to hear places where the poems breathes and sings, where the music stops, where images miss the intended mark, and where over-writing begins. I don’t imagine that many of us experience Yeatsian moments when, after revisions, “a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.” It must be wonderful, but it’s almost never that simple or easy for me.

With all of this in mind, I sent an inquiry to several poet friends whose work I respect and admire and asked them to answer the question,” How do you know when a poem in finished?” Their responses follow, but before you read on, here’s a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that addresses our subject.

How Do I Know When a Poem Is Finished?

When you quietly close

the door to a room

the room is not finished.

It is resting. Temporarily.

Glad to be without you

for a while.

Now it has time to gather

its balls of gray dust,

to pitch them from corner to corner.

Now it seeps back into itself,

unruffled and proud.

Outlines grow firmer.

When you return,

you might move the stack of books,

freshen the water for the roses.

I think you could keep doing this

forever. But the blue chair looks best

with the red pillow. So you might as well

leave it that way.

(Source)

How do you know when a poem is finished?

The Poets’ Responses

Donna Baier Stein:

That’s a tough question to answer! Even after a poem is published I will sometimes make changes when I am reading the poem out loud at an event. So in that sense, it’s never completely finished! But there is a visceral feeling, after working for weeks, months, or even years on a poem, that I get when I feel like I’ve caught what I intended the poem to convey. It’s almost like the closing of a lid, or a sigh of completion. It’s that moment when, to my ear, the poem sounds right and true.

www.donnabaierstein.com

www.tiferetjournal.com

www.amazon.com/Donna-Baier-Stein/e/B000AQ37Z4%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

____________________________________________

Maria Mazziotti Gillan:

I have to say that, for me, I am often wrong about when a poem is finished. I work on it a long time and then I think it’s ready for the world, but if a few weeks go by and I read it out loud, I can tell that a line is off and that it needs to be changed. Sometimes, I don’t notice when there are lines that I’ve repeated or “wrong” words that I’ve used until several weeks go by. I admit that sometimes even after a poem is published, when I get up to read it to an audience, I will spot things that I didn’t realize before; and often in my books that are my reading copies, I make changes years after the poem was first published. I don’t feel that I’ve abandoned poems but more that I need to see them with new eyes as time goes on and to hear them with new ears as well.

Artist website: www.mariamazziottigillan.com

Poetry Website: www.mariagillan.com 

Poetry Blog: www.mariagillan.blogspot.com 

www.amazon.com/s?k=Maria+mazziotti+Gillan&i=digital-text&ref=nb_sb_noss_2

____________________________________________

Joe Weil:

I don’t really abandon poems (though I forget them) and the usual line is “poems aren’t finished, just abandoned.” I keep writing until I no longer feel I am in the poem. Then I step back, and squint at it, the way a painter might squint at a painting to see its overall effect. Then I leave it alone for two weeks and go back and read it. While I wrote it, I kept going back to the beginning and reading it, so the poem has been read by me maybe twenty times in different phases. But now is different. After two weeks, it doesn’t feel like my poem anymore exactly, and I see where its “parent” forgot to take the tag off the pants, and left the child wearing the cuff of the pants caught on a sock, and how there was a mustard stain on the shirt I’d chosen (almost gone but not quite). And I feel sad, very sad because the poor kid is going to get mocked if I let him go out like that. I change the shirt or tuck it in more where the stain doesn’t show, and I take the cuff out of the sock, and put just a little spit on my hand to flatten out a wayward cow’s lick (but not too much) and more or less make sure the kid is presentable. I don’t dress my poems fancy, so a comfortable lived-in look is what I’m going after. Here’s the scary thing: sometimes I forget to go back and re-read the poem and I never read it again or think about it. Years later, while in a panic about some other poem, I stumble over it. My poem has grown up without me. I either like it or I am sorry I sired it. I lose more poems than I revise. My favorite part of poetry is the writing, and sometimes the revision. Because I read the poems so many times while I am writing them, I always almost have them memorized and that means, even if I lose a poem, parts of it, a part here or there, still hang out in my brain. Those are usually the parts that should be in the world. I wrote 20 versions of “Morning at the Elizabeth Arch”—including one as a Pantoum and another as a sonnet. The final version is in on Rattle’s web site. I do re-takes, not just revisions. To me this should have a sense of dress up and play. When you’ve put together the right ensemble, you know your child can walk out the door, get a lover, and put you in a nursing home when you grow old and annoying. Then the poem is done, John Donne.

www.amazon.com/Joe-Weil/e/B001JOU8LC

____________________________________________

Ed Romond:

When I first became serious about writing poetry I attended a lot of workshops where I received feedback on my initial drafts. I considered my poem “finished” if and when the group, especially the leader, considered it a completed poem. As years went on I became more and more a self-editor although there were and continue to be certain friends I share my drafts with for their take on them. These days I read my drafts out loud to myself to hear how they “sound” and to discern if there is dead language that is impeding the poem’s impact. I think I pay more attention now to how I conclude a poem and might decide to change an earlier moment in the poem that will be more congruent with the ending.  Finally, even though I read my drafts out loud to myself I find presenting it at a public reading gives me a strong indication about the poem’s completeness or, in some cases, its need for some further work.

www.edwinromond.com

www.amazon.com/Edwin-Romond/e/B001K8VCZI%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

____________________________________________

Laura Boss:

For me, I almost instinctively know when a poem I’m writing is finished. Maybe because I’m basically an intuitive poet (whatever that may mean to different poets), I invariably hear a click in my head that says “finished.”  Sometimes the intellectual part of me wants to add more details to finish it off (and at times I have), but mostly when I hear that mental “click,” (often at a place of impact), I know the poem is finished.

www.laurabosspoet.wordpress.com

www.amazon.com/Flashlight-Essential-Poets-Laura-Boss-ebook/dp/B00K6N3D1Y/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Laura+Boss+Poetry&qid=1557530739&s=digital-text&sr=1-2-catcorr

www.amazon.com/Best-Lover-Laura-Boss/dp/1630450448/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Laura+Boss+Poetry&qid=1557530777&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-catcorr

____________________________________________

Bob Rosenbloom:

Aside from “never really finished,” I’d like to try and get onto paper the reason why I was drawn or attracted to the poem in the first place. Does the poem get to that point anywhere at all? Are there enough moving parts? Does it click? Can I trim the language, use more striking words, if not vocabulary, polish it up, use some irony, twist it, tweak it. Sometimes, the poem isn’t going to happen, which happens enough. Possibly, I’m too lazy or it’s not such a great idea to begin with. Does the poem get off the launching pad? If I write about a parent, does this poem add to what I’ve already written about them or should that matter?

These are good questions, which I should ask more often. Usually, if I stop writing it’s because I get a general sense I don’t like the poem as much as I thought I would and I should quit while I’m ahead. That’s where writers say keep a notebook. I don’t keep a notebook but it’s probably a good idea. I try to keep an idea in my head but that doesn’t always work.

On the other hand, Saul Bellow said somewhere that we become writers because we liked reading something and feel we could do something like that, repeat a good experience for someone else. Why not?

www.amazon.com/Reunion-Robert-Rosenbloom/dp/1599246511

____________________________________________

Tony Gruenewald:

I like to take the poem for a test drive in front of an audience at an open reading. I can read it aloud at home, but for some reason I get a better feel for the rhythm and breath of the poem in front of people. I also immediately hear what goes clunk to refine the sounds and rhythms. And sometimes someone in the audience hears something, for better or worse, that I don’t hear. A fellow poet once resurrected a poem I’d written off as too obscure and it ended up receiving a Pushcart nomination.

www.tonygruenewald.com

www.amazon.com/Secret-History-New-Jersey/dp/1880764253/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Tony+Gruenewald&qid=1557531004&s=books&sr=1-2-spell

____________________________________________

Renée Ashley:

I do many, many drafts, usually, and the last drafts are oral. I read it out loud, and, if it reads as I’d like it, I read it into a recorder and play it back. I do this a couple of times.  It’s astounding what I catch listening to those recordings. And if I’m changing even a single word or punctuation mark I have to start all over again to assess the whole. And I’d say that I’m aiming to make the language precise and sonically seamless—or, if I’m going for crots, let them have their way (as long as their way is my way)—and that I need to feel a smooth closure that allows me to exit the poem while I still feel I’m pondering the issue or have what may only be a sense of slipping out of the poem but only with a resonant egress. Something needs to be hanging in the air when a poem’s done. No answers nailed down; perhaps a hovering sense of approaching understanding of one thing or another. Something like that. Of course, every time you write a poem it’s the first time you’re writing that particular poem, so you’re a novice every time—who knows what’s going to happen? All this is my ideal composition, though—and how often do we approach our ideal?

www.reneeashleyatwork.com

www.amazon.com/Ren%25C3%25A9e-Ashley/e/B000APV1Y4%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

____________________________________________

Nancy Lubarsky:

You don’t always know.  Sometimes you are on a deadline and you have to end it, finished or unfinished.  Sometimes it is too painful to continue and you have to just leave it. Or you write yourself into a corner and don’t know where to go.  If everything is working (and what a great feeling when it is), you finish the last line or the last edit, and you say, “Yes, yes, yes ... this is it.  This is what I wanted to say and the way I wanted to say it!” 

www.amazon.com/Only-Proof-Nancy-Lubarsky/dp/1945752718

____________________________________________

A big THANK YOU to all the poets who contributed their thoughts
(and their time) to this post!

I’ve included links to their websites and/or recently published books.

Please be sure to visit them online!