Grappling with Middle Age and Being a Mid-Career Poet

Willows Lodge garden, late August

Grappling with Middle Age and Mid-Career Poets

Oof, boy it’s been a week for poetry news – more scandal (another dude who started two MFA programs caught in sexual abuse going back to the seventies), more controversy (white guys saying some stuff about race they probably shouldn’t, mostly, in places like The Sun and The Writer’s Chronicle) and then like a thousand announcements of gigantic fellowships/awards/prizes going to very young poets. Yeah. If that doesn’t make you want to get off Facebook and go write instead…

I posted something on Facebook about the dearth of opportunities for poets after that first or second book prize, the lack of prestige presses reading open submissions or anything but first book contest entries, a whole poetry system that seems to spin on publicizing the young and the new. I guess they are more photogenic! LOL. Not to be bitter and old, but you know, great poets aren’t always the most photogenic or the hippest. Sometimes they are (gasp) over 40! They don’t always go to Iowa or live in NYC! Sigh.

Anyway, the post generated so many responses (some heated) that I had to hide the thread, but it was interesting to read the variety of responses – older poets saying that had given up on “the po biz” or publishing even one book altogether, older poets saying they wanted to encourage younger poets but also wanted more outlets for poets their age. Some folks pointing out that this could be a problem of scarcity – a feeling that the majority of scarce energy, time, money, publicity was going only to some poets, leaving the rest empty-handed. The weird thing is, there’s less scarcity in poetry than usual – poetry books, everbody’s telling us, are selling more than ever. Or “how dare you? Don’t you want to encourage young poets?” (I do!) Or “You should only write for the joy of writing the poem.” (Yes, to a point…but I also write to share that with others…)

At the same time this week, I have been coming to terms with the fact that I am now squarely middle-aged. 45! There’s no arguing with it. Last year I was so concerned that I wasn’t going to live to see another year I didn’t have much energy to think about it, but now that I’ve lived another year, suddenly I’m faced with the smaller problems of aging (not just the full-blown scariness of cancer and MS). Bunions, teeth that have started to crumble under years of jaw-clenching stress, a thyroid gone wonky, weight gain. Little stuff, but stuff nonetheless. Yay! This is the glamorous poet life you want to read about, right?

I was joking with my mother asking what women were supposed to do for mid-life crises. I don’t really want a convertible or a new, younger husband, plastic surgery, or a year off to explore Thailand. Hrmph. Also, I don’t really have the money for most of that stuff (and I’m pretty happy with my current husband).  I don’t want to try the newest miracle diet. I’ve already dyed my hair pink a couple of times (and probably will again). The picture at the top of the post is a picture of a nearby garden in late August, which has its own kind of over-ripe, aging beauty. A reminder that there is a beauty to every season. (Also, August has been showing up a lot in my poems lately.)

I was watching that old (and not great) Sylvia Plath movie with Gwyneth and James Bond and Dumbledore. When her ambition and life goals got thwarted, she often attempted suicide (and of course, she was struggling with mental illness that was poorly understood and treated at that time.)  I understand the frustration but not the death wish. (And I wish the movie had focused less on her jealousy and mental illness and more on her weird cheeriness, humor, all-Americanism, her ambition but also her meanness – anyway, she was way more multi-dimensional than that movie gave her credit for.) But I do wonder – is there a point at which thirty year old Plath thought – I’m too old to make it now in poetry? I’m sure that there was. And that was…what, fifty years ago now? Have things changed for a middle-aged female poet much? I wonder as I contemplate sending out my sixth poetry manuscript – am I too old to make it now in poetry? (Of course, “make it” has a variable, interpretable meaning – I think Sylvia, who by thirty had already published one book of poetry to very few reviews and had just had her thinly veiled autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, published – was pretty successful, since I didn’t publish a book til I was 32, and she had been winning fellowships and prizes since she was 20. Some people might look at might at me and say, “Hey, you’ve published five books and were just talking about your acceptances in the last post!” Yes, I’m thankful for the good things – the reviews and people teaching my book, every acceptance, the presses that too a chance on me. Success is relative, and one thing Sylvia and I might have in common is that terrible sin for a female writer: ambition.)

I wrote an essay a while back for The Rumpus called “the Amazing Disappearing Woman Writer,” talking about Ellen Bass’s rise to fame in her early years, her disappearance from the map of mainstream poetry, and a bit of a late triumphal return. That seems to be a pattern – people seem more willing to embrace a woman poet when she is young and sexy, forget about her in middle age, and cheer her again when (perhaps) she is seen as less of a threat, more of a mother figure, in her later years? It takes a lot of courage and persistence and work to try to stay in the spotlight. The ones that stay there, they are fighting to stay there. Or other people are fighting for them. Anyway, this is why you may notice that my book reviews often focus on women, and women in middle age particularly, ones that I don’t feel have had enough written about them. Some poets get way too much review space, and others way too little, and I’ll do what I can when I have the energy to try to put a spotlight on these women in their middle years.

But there remains the problem – the culture of poetry’s fetishism of young poets. The desire for the new. Instagram poetry could be a great way to reach more people with poetry – or a great way to shallow-up the world of poetry, focusing on the pretty image and the tiny, easily digestible poem. I don’t have the answers. But you might – if you have the power to buy a book of poetry, or reviewing one, think about giving your attention to a poet who might not be the flavor of the month or in the spotlight, but might speak uniquely to you. If you are a publisher or editor, think about your gatekeepers – if they’re all 22, that might be affecting what gets past them, because at 22, you feel 30 is old – and that gives you a different worldview than someone, say, in their fifties. (If they’re all 22 white able-bodied males, you may have even more thinking to do.) Think about diversifying opportunity. After all, Ellen Bass never stopped being a terrific writer – she just dropped off the radar for a while.