End?

In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings: no one has yet to begin a life who will not end it.

In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it. Not every poem is
finished
Paul Valéry, the French poet and thinker, once said that no poem is ever ended, that every poem is merely abandoned. This saying is also attributed to Stéphane Mallarmé, for where quotations begin is in a cloud.
Paul Valéry also described his perception of first lines so vividly, and to my mind so accurately, that i have never forgotten
it: the opening line of a poem, he said,
In the beginning was the Word. Western civilization rests upon those words. And yet there is a lively group of thinkers who believe that in the beginning was the Act. that nothing can precede action.
I believe the poem is an act of the mind. I think it is easier to talk about the end of a poem than it is to talk about its beginning.
An act of the mind. To move, to make happen, to make manifest. Be an act of Congress. A state of real existence rather than possibility.
As the poet Ralph Angel puts it,
the weird theatrical shit is what goes on around us every day of our lives; an animal of only instinct, Johnny Ferret, has in his actions drama, but no theater; theater requires that you draw a circle around the action and observe it from outside the circle;
Everyone knows that if you query poets about how their poems begin, the answer is always the same:
And the lesson is always the same, and young poets recognize this to be one of the most important lessons they can learn:
Now here is something really interesting (to me), something you can use at a standing-up-only party when everyone is tired of hearing there are one million
words used by the Esimo for snow. This is what Ezra Pound learned from Ernest Fenollosa:
That sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand.
When I told Mr. Angel about the lifelong sentence, he said:
You might say a poem is a , a living , what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart. Between the first and last lines there exists—a poem—and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other.
Would not speak to each other. Because the lines of a poem are speaking to each other, not you to them or they to you.
I will tell you what I miss:
It was its own thrill.I didn't ignore them, I read them, even if only silently, with a deep sense of feeling:
I have never, in my life, read a poem that ended with the words The End. Why is that, I wonder. I think perhaps the brevity of poems compared to novels makes one feel that there has been no great sustention of energy, no marathon worthy of pulling tape across the finish line.
And then I found a poem of mine that I had carefully written by hand in the sixth grade, and at the bottom of the page, in India ink, beautifully apart from the rest of the text, were the words The End.
And I realized children very often denote the end because it is indeed a great achievement for them to have writte anything, and they are completely unaware of the number of stories and poems that have already been written;
Roland Barthes suggests there are three ways to finish any piece of writing:
Gaston Bachelard says the single most succinct and astonishing thing:

I am afraid there is no way around this. It is the one try inevitable thing. And if you believe that, then you are conceding that in the beginning was the act, not the word.

The painter Cy Twombly quotes John Crowe Ransom, on a scrap of paper:

Easy and appropriate thing for a painter to say. Cy Twombly uses text in some of his drawings and paintings, usually poetry, usually Dante. Many men and women have written long essays and lectures on the ideas they see expressed in Twombly's work.

Bachelard's sentence simply says this:

The poem is the consequence of its origins. Give me the fruit and I will take from it a see and plant it and watch grow the tree from which it fell.

Barbara Henstein Smith, in her book Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, says this:

But there is no book I know of on the subject of how poems begin. How can the origin be traced when there is no form or shape that precedes it to trace?

It is exactly like tracing the moment of the big bang

I have flipped through books, reading hundreds of opening and closing lines, across and I have discovered that first lines are remarkably similar, even repeated, and that last lines are remarkably similar , even repeated. Of course in all cases they remain remarkably distinct, because the words belong to completely different poems.

And i began to realize, reading these first and last lines, that there are not only the first and last lines of the lifelong sentence we each speak but also the first and last lines of the long piece of language delivered to use by others, by those we listen to.

And in the best of all possible lives, that beginning and that end are the same:
And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth:
But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory's fog is rising. Among Emily Dickinson's last words (in a letter).