Note: This essay will serve as the introduction to the anthology Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2025.
This anthology takes us to the end of the poem — and “out of the poem’s tunnel of words,” as Marianne Boruch puts it, where we might suddenly be “blinking slightly, released from some dark, eyes adjusting, what was ordinary seen differently now. Or not.”1
W. H. Auden famously said, paraphrasing Paul Valéry, “A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.”2 This statement applies to more than simply the ending of the poem, of course, but it certainly evokes the questions of where and how to end a poem. In this anthology, we aim to present poems that enact remarkable answers to these questions.…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, January/February 2025