could end anywhere

Once the poem has established itself, any late line can be a last line.

a door and a window

My sense of the poem is rather classic. I think of a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't believe in open form. A poem may be open, but then it doesn't have form. Merely to stop a poem is not to end it. I don't want to suggest that I believe in neat little resolutions. To put a logical cap on a poem is to suffocate its original impulse. Just as the truly great piece of architecture moves beyond itself into its environment, into the landscape and the sky, so the kind of poetic closure that interests me bleeds out of its ending into the whole universe of feeling and thought. I like an ending that's both a door and a window.

—Stanley Kunitz, "The Art of Poetry No. 29," an interview by Chris Busa, The Paris Review (Spring 1982, No. 83)

defiant end

When a poem defies an ending it’s perhaps finished.

sense of an ending

Should the poem end with ‘thus…’, or with ‘and yet…’?

chute to the unknown

He tended to end a poem with a line that was like pulling the lever to a trapdoor.

end this mess

It wasn’t that the poem was looking for an epiphany; it was looking for any kind of ending that would make sense of what came before.

perfunctory panache

Like someone exiting, swinging a cape about his shoulders, the poet ended his poem with one of those large rhetorical flourishes.

lack of closure

Lack of closure is only an alternate strategy of closure, because poems, after all, finally, do end...