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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Why is a poem abandoned? Not because to end it would feel like death, but because there is no such thing as real closure in poetry. We may declare a poem “finished,” meaning that is the best we can do with it for now, and send it out into the world that way. Twenty years later we may do something more with it, revise it in some way, even after publication. Sometimes we abandon a poem because the conflict in it has not been resolved. A good poem often contains contradictions, emotions that seem to cancel each other out. The resolution of the irreconcilable may be the objective of the poem, and the music and imagery of the poem play with that.
The problems that the poet attempts to resolve, however, are aesthetic, not personal. The poet is not at the mercy of or manipulated by the images used in the poem; rather, she may be drawing upon the materials of the self, much as a visual artist or sculptor would use clay or stone or paint to create forms and compositions. Poetry, even at its most “confessional,” is not psychoanalysis; nor, even at its most cathartic and therapeutic for the poet, is it psychotherapy. It is art, and its concerns are those of every artist: rhythm, form, structure, image—the music of words, achieved through the manipulation of black type on