Changing Attitudes, Mid-Life Crises for Poets, and Three Months Into a Book Release

You know, the last week I’ve been pretty sick, the weather has been cold and rainy, and I received no particular good news. But I suddenly became aware of things that I should be happy about.

Nine little ducklings hatched in the pond across from my townhouse. Three months into the launch of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, I think I’ve been driving so hard – setting up readings, sending out review copies and PR letters, that I wasn’t thinking about the good things – that I’m lucky to have a fourth book out, that I’m lucky to have Amazon reviews and regular reviews out this soon after a poetry book coming out (it can take up to six months, sometimes, to get even one review – and it’s happened to me just like that with previous books, so I know.)

Instead of looking at the news – which has been sort of dismal for the entirety of 2015 – I started looking at other things – little kindnesses, people with goodwill, the flowers and tiny baby bunnies. I was trapped inside being too sick to go outside, and sort of brain-mushy from fevers and cold medicine, so I watched Mystery Science 3000 episodes from the library. I watched movies, listened to books on CD and read books just for fun.

I thought about my earliest ambitions as a poet – and haven’t I already fulfilled some of those hopes? I mean, no Pulitzer, no tenure-track teaching job, no NYC apartment cocktail parties, but the rest of it? I mean, if I think about, my writing life actually pretty good. I have great writing friends, a town to live in with frequent poetry readings and a bunch of book lovers, and lots of time to write and a spouse who loves my work and supports what I do. I’ve met and corresponded with poets I didn’t ever think I would even see in person. I’ve published four books. I think it’s so easy to get caught up with what we don’t have – the twenty-somethings with multiple prizes on their first books, the dudes with the tenure-track jobs ten years younger than me with no books – and the idea that by this or that age, we should have achieved something more than we have – I guess this whole midlife crisis thing, I’m 42 and where am I, what have I accomplished – but if I were talking to my younger self, she’d be thrilled to be where I am now. She would feel grateful. She wouldn’t be grousing about the stuff she didn’t have. She might not be excited about some of the physical limitations I’ve come up against, but then again, compared to where I’ve been in the last few years, I’m doing great – no wheelchair or cane, very few hospital visits in the last six months, etc. And how many people have been married 21 years (this July)? That’s something, too.

So I can’t find a house in my area in my budget – we did spend more than fifteen years as renters! Poets, unless they inherit or marry money, typically aren’t buying big mansions in expensive cities anyway, right? What did I expect?

So what am I saying? I had a sudden change in perspective that shifted my mood from fairly depressed to maybe slightly hopeful. I thought about some of my former poetry professors from my Master’s Degree days, maybe they were never media darlings, but they liked and were proud of the work they did, and that was enough for them. That may be the best attitude a poet can have. We don’t have to be media darlings, we don’t have to win the coolest prizes, we don’t have to live in beautifully decorated, perfect houses with water views. We can just enjoy the work we do every day, and that can be enough.