Thinking about the progress of this poem, I know it'll be one of those ones I'll have to step back from. My instincts tell me it's not done. When I'm away from it, and run the gist of this piece through my mind, I know it's not all there for the reader, it's not entirely accessible. I like to think that, within my work, no matter how punched up the diction is, or scrambled up the syntax, the underlying meaning, narrative, whatever, is still there for the reader to find and hold onto. It's there, honest! If there's one thing I feel I took away from university, at least the writing program portion of it, it is how far your reader will go in order to understand a poem. I apply this knowledge every chance I get; it was always incredibly frustrating to have a room full of people say they just don't get it. And as a student writer, the first things I had to learn was that sometimes the room is not filled with stupid people. Sometimes, you just lose your reader. Sometimes, you need to pull a thread through the poem that can lead a reader along to the end, or knock out some of the obstacles, or uncoil dizzying chronology.
Or maybe sometimes, if a bunch of trees in a poem go crazy at the end, the stuff that happens in the middle can go ahead and happen, and no one really needs to make sense of it all anyways!
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