i've often heard people argue that good or great poetry can only be written by the young. ironically, those arguments were usually made by middle-aged & older poets. i felt in my gut that wasn't true, or i didn't want it to be true, or that it was useless to believe it even if it was true. should i just give up because i'm too old to write good or great poetry? i do think there are certain types of poems that i may no longer be able to write as well as i might have when i was younger, such as poems evoking the experience of falling in love? and i've never been much of a conceptual poet either, so at least i have that going for me, except conceptual poetry has been the fad. i guess i would rather be indifferent to peaking, whenever it happens, if it hasn't already. i write because i have to. i'm an amateur and this isn't a career for me, as it is for so many nowadays. there was a scene in the spalding gray documentary that came out a couple of years ago in which someone who knew him described the arc of his life & career, which were inextricably twined, as the gradual opening of a deeply self-absorbed man as he began to report his encounters with the world. that resonated with me, as it probably describes me as well, as i have gradually allowed more & more of the world to be encountered after shunning it for so long after my traumatically abusive childhood. lately, i've been practicing being present when i do my cashier shifts. i practice feeling my body, feeling the floor through my feet, opening my chest, and hardest of all for me, making eye contact. with each transaction, however it goes, i wish everyone, as best as i can, to have a good day. this has become a practice of accepting the flavor of each interaction, which is challenging when people are weird or stressed or unpleasant. what i've been noticing lately is how this practice is bleeding into everything i do, including my writing, which has become a record of each moment's opening. in this way, i am a lens, catching light. in this way, i am a mic, catching sound.
The difference in the life cycles of conceptual and experimental poets is no mere numbers game, but stems from basic differences in the nature of their art. Conceptual poets are brash, iconoclastic, and often transgressive, and are generally at their best before they become constrained by established habits of thought. In contrast, the greatest achievements of experimental poets depend on deep knowledge of their subjects and subtle mastery of language and style. Robert Frost believed that a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom." He contended that poets need a kind of knowledge that cannot be gained solely in libraries, or acquired deliberately, but comprises "what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields." Randall Jarrell explained that Frost's greatest poems "come out of a knowledge of people that few poets have had, and they are written in a verse that was, sometimes with absolute mastery, the rhythms of actual speech."
Do Poets Peak Young? Don't Believe It
David Galenson Professor of Economics, University of Chicago
A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
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