"Hi, I'm Paul Muldoon and I want to thank you for sending in your questions to Borders Open-Door Poetry. We have a question here from Elizabeth F.: 'The more I change a poem the better it reads to me, so my editing process never ends. How do you know when a poem is finished and editing should stop?' she inquires.

Well, that of course is one of the big questions, perhaps the biggest one. There's one that comes before it though, and I don't want this to sound too silly. The first question is, 'where do we begin the poem?' What I like to think is that we try to begin the poem whether it sounds like an ad for a detergent or a washing powder. We try to begin the poem where you might have expected it to end. We try to begin in a place where one is really going into territory that is unexpected. So we try to begin with an engaging idea . We try to continue in an engaging mode, of course.  And we try to end with some sense of resolution. Not necessarily with fireworks going off but there has to be a sense that we have come out of something; that there's been a reason for us being in there in the first place. And there's a sense, I suppose, that we've come out through a window or we hear a door shut, however quietly, behind us. Sometimes the door slams; sometimes it just creaks closed.

But to know, to know when the poem's finished as it were, I think has to do with our having a sense as the first reader of the poem, that something has happened to us; that we've seen something, that we've experienced something new, that we've had a revelation.  Emily Dickinson, of course, had this idea that, at end of a poem, coming out of a poem, one should have a sense that the top of one's head has been taken off.  Certainly at least, she felt, that the back of the hairs should be standing on the back of one's head. So a physical sensation often accompanies that sense that the poem is finished. We have a visceral sense that something has happened to us and that's often an indicator of something really really major having happened. The hair standing on the back of one's head doesn't necessarily come to us with every poem, alas, but certainly to come out with a sense that something has changed, including ourselves."