Rauan Klassnik recently tweeted:
the end of every poem's like a toilet flushingAnother tweet from one Diana Salier:
— Rauan Klassnik (@Klassnik) March 9, 2012
stop ending your pomes with a period to sound profound.Much as I'm collecting definitions of poetry, I'd love to hear more quotes about endings. Leave them in the comments, or offer your own profundities. In the meanwhile [sic], here are some of Matt Henriksen's lovely and striking endings, robbed from their context.
— diana salier (@dianasalier) April 17, 2012
Various from "Copse" (short untitled poems in a series):
We lived in a small house
in the quiet North.
What I cannot find in the morning is most myself.
She stood
there
to say "aberration,"
to want the day back.
From "Regulations of the Assassins" (beautiful fucking poem):
In all that nonsense I became a gun.
It's raining now, goddamn.
From "Afterlife with Still Life":
Your skull is
perfecting the triangle,
making nothing out of three.
Another makes immaculate the mind.
From "Ghost":
This was the beginning of the third year
no one called for anyone. So it is writ.
From "Gorge":
What I erase out here repeats forever.
And from "Insomnia" (which I've mentioned before): "Jesus, why must it / be so late, so bright, and so early?" What I wrote was, "The end is like the end of the novel-within-the-movie at the end of Stand By Me (Richard Dreyfuss typing, Doogie-Howser-style, 'Jesus, does anyone?'). This is the Beatles' song of poems, overplayed, over-perfect, over-quotable, and O."
I guess I like endings with rhythm and gravity.
You remind me of some ending wisdom: Yeats' notion that an ending should be like the lid clicking on a perfectly made box; Richard Tillinghast's complaint that "a typical poem [by Jim Harrison] will not conclude; it will simply stop." I like to read well-wrought urns with inevitable-seeming endings, but I'm not into writing them. I like to write a poem--or should I say a poetry?--that's more like talk or journal entries. Often I simply stop. When you run out of things to say, you stop talking; when your coffee break is over or the page in your spiral notebook ends, you end your journal entry. And the ending is evitable. If that woman in the paisley shawl hadn't trudged in, the journal entry might've ended with someone at a nearby table saying into his cellphone "Hi, this is Arlyn Marquardt. I'm just confirming our appointment for Thursday." I mean, I'm like Ashbery in that I have an endless associative chain in my head. Now and then I saw out a few links and call it a poem. You want it to begin with a hooky link and end with a resonant link, but the first and last links--all the links, really--could have been different.
ReplyDeleteI've always been resistant to the lid-clicking thing. Makes the poem seem so final and closed off.
DeleteI like to suggest that if you set out to write an ending for your poem, the actual ending should be about two lines short of that.
ReplyDelete"End earlier" was one of the techniques in my recent "How to revise a poem" class. I also suggesting ending later, because sometimes people stop before they've said anything really interesting.
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