When is a Poem Ripe?

C. Kubasta & Poet Friends

As poets, we often work in a solitary way. We may seek community to share our work—a critique group, or writing buddies—and this can be essential to getting out of our own heads and hearing our work in a context off our computer screen or off the page. Maybe there’s an Open Mic we visit, or a classroom space. Perhaps we draft and then tinker and then send a missive into the ether. All this begs the question: how do we know when a poem is ready? In keeping with the theme of our issue, I posed this question to other poets by asking them when they knew their poems were “ripe”? Answers vary and different poets understood the question differently; we each have our processes and ways of engaging with our work, and our respective readers.

Some poets, like Elizabeth Tornes, whose most recent book is Northern Skies, wrote both about her process and the importance of a community of writers. On process she notes, “I write many drafts of poems and print out each one—I need to see it on the page, to read it over and speak it out loud, to see how it can be improved.” From there she asks questions: 

Like many poets, Tornes finds that the sharing of the poem is integral to her writing process. “When I’ve revised it to the point where I can’t find anything else I can do to make it a stronger poem, I know it’s ready to share with others. I can’t see beyond the blinders of my own experience and tastes, so I seek out and listen to the valuable suggestions of my fellow poets and writers as I work on the final version.”

David Southward, author of Bachelor’s Buttons, writes:

Southward also addressed the question in terms of what we write about. The word choice of ripeness got him thinking about the blank page. “I can’t write about subject until it’s sufficiently “ripe” for me to bite into. It just doesn’t speak to me or seem accessible until that happens, much as I want it to. My notebooks are FULL of unripe ideas in brown paper bags . . . .”

B.J. Best, the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Everything about Breathing (Bent Paddles Press), who teaches creative writing and game design at Carroll University, responded with an email subject line that read as a poem line: “A poem should be palpable and mute / as a globed fruit.” (He’s kind of that guy.) In the body of the email he continued, “The cynics will say, Art is never finished, only a band in a dive bar, arguing with the manager about how much they were supposed to get paid. Don’t believe them.”

This email arrived nearly simultaneously with David Southward’s above, and I was fascinated with how different the two responses were in some ways, but also how the metaphor of “ripeness” seemed to be a meaningful way for thinking about poetry and its inception and evolution. Although then Best moved on to other imagery. “A poem is finished when its skin is taut as the head of a snare drum or a reflection on a morning pond.  You can’t touch it without disturbing something, without disturbing many things.”

When I posed the question to Kylie Jorgensen, they referred to it as “poem plucking” and offered:

Milwaukee poet Scott Lowery thanked me first for the question, and I have to here thank our guest editor Catherine Young for our overall theme. We’re closing out our sixth year of Bramble, and I’m thinking of how this space has evolved over time, and hopefully provided a platform for poets to share their work. The idea of ripeness, with all its connotations, is rich for mining: we may think of fruits and harvest.

Lowery writes, “I think there’s quite a bit of simply waiting, looking for signs of ripeness, just as with tomatoes or pears being assessed on the kitchen counter. Instead of color or aroma, I’m looking for sense and sound, and I’m testing by re-reading and re-writing, over and over. Have I found the words yet that lift the image off the ground of everyday descriptive prose?”

He then talks about reading aloud, and I find that’s a necessary part of my process as well. While I’m not a regular reader at Open Mics, I do find that’s where I can really determine if a poem is working or not. I also have a group of poet friends and like Jorgensen I use that space to read very fresh work to hear (outside of my head) whether it lands or not. Thinking about the language of his work, Lowery says “I usually want the poem to sound like me, whether it’s a hidden, inner voice or my everyday conversational patter. And I want the sonics to contribute musicality to the language. That part is much like mouth-feel for the tomato or pear.”

Moving away from the fruit imagery though he cautions, “A poem is much more multi-dimensional than a pear—if some part of the poem feels off or not quite right when read or shared or performed, it doesn’t go in the trash. I just make a note, and later happily return to working on it again, draft after draft. In that sense, perhaps ripeness is always relative, and ultimately aspirational.”

I’ve been working on a poem lately that I think I really like, but I’m not sure yet; I plan to share it soon. I’ll probably share in a few ways and see what happens: send to a writing friend, read in a community space, submit. At each of those inflection points, there will be edits. In that way, the sharing is an integral part of my revision process. A slow simmer maybe. I’ll let Best finish us here, as he also talked about the point and purpose of sharing, what the ripe poem can or should do:

A poet, fiction writer, & occasional reviewer, Kubasta lives & writes in the Driftless area of Wisconsin. She is the executive director at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts and managing editor of Bramble. www.ckubasta.com.