It’s Tuesday, and the dVerse Poets Pub is open with snacks and beverages of your choice, as well as a selection of delicious poetry.  I’m Kim from writinginnorthnorfolk.com, your host for this week’s Poetics.

Back in May, I received an email from the Literary Hub, in which Emily Skaja suggests 50 ways to end a poem.  I have selected eight of those endings, some with examples, with which I would like you to end your poems. 

1. End with a question, like Robert Frost in his poem ‘Reluctance’, about the end of a season.
2. End on an image (the classic choice) as in ‘Season’s end’ by Nichita Stanescu.
3. If the poem has been primarily narrative in mode (scene, character, plot, dialogue), end with a lyric strategy (repetition, music, imagery, figurative language) as in ‘Ebb’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poem about the end of a relationship.
4. End by going back to the beginning (circle back to an image, replicate your syntax, repeat a thesis, return to the start of the story) similar to Robert Frost in ‘Fire and Ice’, about the end of the world, which it is said was the inspiration for the title of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.
5. End with a punchline like T.S. Eliot in ‘The Hollow Men’, which famously ends by telling us that the ‘world ends’ with ‘a whimper’ rather than a bang.
6. Change your tone; for example, by making fun of something you may have taken very seriously until now, as in the surprising ending of David Gascoyne’s poem, ‘The End Is Near the Beginning’, in which he writes about an ageing woman; ‘the end’ is presumably death.
7. End with an erasure of your own words.
8. Distil your imagery into its essential parts and close your poem in the compressed style of haiku.

^{Stack. The end of summer. Morning, 1891, by Claude Monet}

The poem I would like you write is about the end of something: the end of a season, a relationship, a story, a letter, a journey, a dream, a life, the world, etc. You can write in any form, rhyming or not; just make sure it ends in one of the ways described above – and let us know which you chose and why.

If you are new to dVerse and/or Poetics, here’s how to join in:

• Write a poem in response to the challenge;
• Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below;
• There you will find links to other poets, and more will join, so check back for their poems;
• Read and comment on other poets’ work – we all come here to have our poems appreciated;
• Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog;
• Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like. We are a friendly bunch of poets.
• Have fun.