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| SPACE: There’s this wonderful idea in the foreword to Pidgin Levitations, this idea that there’s no perfect poem—or rather, in your phrase, no “finished” poem. On one hand, I could ask you to talk more about this; on the other, I could ask you what distinction you make between a perfect poem and a finished poem…
| DE UNGRIA: I don’t think there’s any such thing as perfection in this world—that’s what I’ve discovered as I’ve grown older. One can only aspire for it, which is good enough in sentiment as one motivation. I’d rather think of works as finished or unfinished, although again, in literature, nothing is really finished. Robert Graves said that you write only one story, probably inviting only just one form. There are just variations of the same thing. So that is the sense in which I take “unfinished” to mean.
| My whole career as a writer, for instance, is unfinished, is on-going. I still feel that I need to say something more about some things, and it may or may not be similar to what I’ve said before, or it’s just a variation of what I’ve said before, but the urge continues, and that is the bigger sense in which I take “unfinished” to mean. Particular works are over, individual poems are over. I hope that I have not been really writing the same poem over and over, but
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