Craft: How to End Poems

Kunitz, Crane, Sommer, Dove, Coleridge, "The Burghers of Calais," Jarrell, Rilke, Rukeyser, Kafka

If you wait long enough everything ends. Poems have endings, too.

The sense and music of poem have to culminate somehow. The energy that you’ve put into the inert words has to go somewhere. Where does it go? does it dissipate, open up, shut down, close, or summarize? Does the speaker undergo some kind of transformation?

There are as many ways to end poem…