from A river runs through it: a writing diary

, collaborating with Julie Carr

In The End (2020), Aditi Machado writes: “Sonnets tend toward completion.” The postmodern ethos purposely refutes this. There is the poetics of completion, and the poetics of open-endedness of the postmodern lyric, specifically in the traditions of the long poem or the serial poem. And then there is the place where the poem simply ends; and an ending, of course, that neither precludes nor presumes closure. The place where the poem ends exists as a spectrum between two poles. Such as this paragraph.