How to Get Out of a Poem

An editorial by Luke Allan

Issue 94 Editorial
by Luke Allan

I’ve been thinking lately about closure. In a magazine like this one, closure probably refers to the way a poem comes to an end, that sense of finishedness we feel when the end of a poem feels like the end of a poem. But there are many ways to get out of a poem, and not all poems send us home with a goldfish in a bag. Maria Isakova Bennett’s disintegrating wordscape, Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s open-ended dash, and Harriet Truscott’s fragmentary index are examples from this issue of poems that resist conclusion.

In her book on poetic closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes the sonic, rhythmic, and imagistic cues that can be used to make an ending feel like an ending. If the last line resolves a rhyme, or completes a metrical phrase, this creates an impression of closure. If a poem concludes with an image of falling or sinking or some other kind of ‘terminal motion’, this too makes for a very endingy ending (Smith puts it rather more eloquently and calls it a ‘kinesthetic image’). Kit Fan’s concluding image of sleep comes to mind here, as does Tammy Armstrong’s aborted phone call, but also perhaps – and more confusingly – Maria’s disintegrating wordscape again.