When to Quit a Poem?
Thanks for stopping by! If you're new here and want to keep up on poetry and 32 Poems, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.
Years ago, a student mentioned to me that he worked in a Japanese restaurant. I was a poetry graduate student at the time and knew this inexpensive restaurant very well.
When I mentioned being surprised at not ever seeing him in the restaurant, he said it’s because he had to stay in the back. He said he’d been working for years in the kitchen — waiting to get promoted to waiter — and the owner always promoted the Asian workers. Evidently, the owner did not think a white waiter would look authentic in her restaurant. Of course, I guess she did not mind having mostly non-Japanese waiters. Maybe she thought no one would notice?
My student was absolutely enraged as he told me this story.
I wondered why — when there were so many other restaurants where this boy could have worked — that he chose to keep working at this one restaurant.
Did he think the owner would change her mind? Was the pay that much better than the other 100 restaurants around town?
The larger question is when do any of us to decide to quit?
Now some folks have trouble with the word ‘quit’ as meaning we’re losers. Well, to quit one thing means to make room for something new. You can view the word however you want. I chose to view it as making room for a new adventure.
But that doesn’t mean I always know when to quit.
When do you know to quit a poem? When do you know to quit a big project?
And, no, I don’t plan to quit my job, 32 Poems or this blog!
Your thoughts?
- August 5th
I blogged about this recently to. I called it “retiring poems.”
For me I finally let a poem go when it remains at the initial image/idea/line that started the poem and never becomes more than that even as I try to tweak it.
Now bigger projects? Still have two chapbooks out to contests and I can’t decide how man contests I’m going to enter before I consider them “retired.”
Great post
I usually know after the first draft or two if the poem is going to work. If it doesn’t, I either delete it or I keep the poem and mine some of the workable lines in other poems.
[…] Commentary On 21st Century Poetics When Is A Poem Finished?5 August 2008, the poet @ 8:30 pmDeborah Ager asks, “When to quit a […]
I’ve always thought that a poem was done when I couldn’t take anything else out of it and improve it.
I don’t usually shill products, but there is a book out by Seth Godin called “The Dip” (based on his blog) that is all about when to quit and when to stick it through. I think he does a pretty good job helping the reader identify a dip versus a rut versus a quest, and so on. As someone who is continually overcommitted, sometimes to projects that don’t really nourish me, I found it useful.
If I don’t love a poem by the first revision, it’s probably never going to take root in a MS. Probably part of the reason I dislike prompts: I’m not patient enough to evolve them through enough variations so as to erase the traces/framework of the prompt, so the poems never feel like “mine.”
I love, love, love the idea of quitting as a way to “make room for something new.” I need to remember that.
This also begs another important question. How many times has my sushi been rolled by a white guy? Not sure how to get a poem out of that but I’ll give it a try … for a while.
I stop working on a poem when it seems like my revisions keep making it worse.
I’m not sure if I ever quit a poem — I just put it away. It’s not unusual for me to rescue a poem after months and see if I can make it work. On the other hand, this present way of writing does leave me with huge scrap piles of poems all over the place.
Excellent question! And I suppose almost as many answers as there are responders. I’m impressed that Collin and Sandra know (pretty much) after the first draft if a poem is going to make it or not–a sign of their experience and professionalism, I think. My own practice varies considerably, with no consistent pattern. Also, I find that a poem can be complete, but just not that good. When successful, a poem is a recipe for cooking something that cannot be named.
I’m interested in: what percentage of your poems do you give up on?
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” - Paul Valery
There’s a David Mamet quote about writing, something along the lines of how good writing is like a fashionable appearance at a party– you arrive late and leave early.
I’ve quit relationships easier than I’ve quit poems. I guess my general rule is that if they keep bothering me, I stick with them. Often, I find they quit me, and when that happens, it seems to be a sign; I prefer to be chased! I’ve had poems that stopped bothering me to get them down after a week, but others have hung around in my brain for years before I write anything down. Those aren’t necessarily abandoned, just in hibernation.
Some smarty (a Russian smarty, I think) once said that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” I think that, in part, is true. The question then becomes why it was abandoned. Is it because it’s as close to finished as possible or because the poet is bored with it, or lazy, or has to feed babies….
Sometimes I think that I convince myself that my poems are “finished” to avoid the ditch-digging-type work of revision. I’d rather flit off to another project than sit down and tinker with a poem.
But I know when something is wrong with a poem and I trust that voice. And I’m getting better at avoiding my laziness. I just ripped apart and rebuilt a poem and it’s better for it. A couple years ago I would have never done that.
I think it was Sylvia Plath who worked and re-worked poems until they worked. That’s determination. I wonder if we all do that to some extent. Even if I abandon a poem today, the germ of an idea will come back later and perhaps turn into a poem.