As a person over the age of 40, I naturally find such lists rather depressing, and prizes such as the Yale Younger Poets Series evoke the same feeling. I was not able to begin writing seriously until I was 30 years old. I say "was not able" because I had spent my 20s trying and failing to write well. There were numerous reasons: (1) I was trying to write fiction but didn't know I wasn't a fiction writer; (2) I was not in school, nor did I hang out with any writers, nor did I have a mentor, so I had neither a steady writing model nor critical encouragement; (3) I was extraordinarily absorbed by my reading life; (4) I was trying to learn how to hold down a job (not well) and to be in love (possibly too well); (5) as a recovering child violinist, I was having difficulty figuring out if I had any real adult talent for anything.
But the threads began to weave themselves into a pattern. I acquired a genre, a place, a subject, a mentor, imaginative concentration, and the time and ability to practice. I had a decade of apprenticeship, and I published my first book of poems during the summer of 2004, just before I turned 40.
So here I am age 45: located somewhere in that netherworld between emerging and midcareer writer. I hope I haven't written my best work yet. I hope that being a writer isn't like being a rock star or a baseball player . . . washed up by 50, suitable for nothing but advertisements and pontification.
I look at these lists and I think about Marian Evans, the great and matchless George Eliot, who published her first fiction, the story collection called Scenes of Clerical Life, when she was 39. It was not her greatest work. All of her novels came later--Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner. She was 50 when she published Middlemarch, 57 when she published Daniel Deronda.
And then there was John Keats, who died at age 26, after writing some of the greatest poems in the English language since the death of Milton.
Could it be that our lives are variable trajectories? How can commentators make such silly pronouncements and assumptions about artistic potential? I wonder if this foolishness about youthful promise is an offshoot of the way in which creative writing has become academicized (and what a dreadful word that is; if I were a copyeditor, I would make the author change it). I would be interested to know how many of the people on the New Yorker's fiction list are MFA products. To be sure, the Yale series has been around longer than the MFA programs have been. Nonetheless, a look at the list does clarify something: that not too many of those names have lasted in our consciousness. But the ones that have lingered belong, on the whole, to poets who, as older men and women, went on to create richer and more complicated work.
3 comments:
I think of Patricia Fargnoli, whose first book of poems was not published until she was 60-something. She's the model I look to.
You're right, Maureen: we need to remember the artists who spent their lives LIVING as well as writing.
I thought I'd share this friend's email comment:
"For what it's worth, I've always thought those 'up-and-coming' lists are worth basically zero. Prejudice or not, my belief is they continually list writers within a certain range, the range currently deemed 'acceptable' by current critical standards. Which I think history would show are usually a pretty unreliable guide to anything of lasting value. My limited experience says they overrate most authors they promote.
Besides, it's a culture obsessed by youth, including in the arts. At 53 I can assure you I care less and less what most young authors have to say, for a simple reason. What insight based on experience are they drawing from? Warren wrote All the King's Men, by far his best book (by far), at 42, I think. And it shows. A self-serving argument? Well heck, why shouldn't my tastes change and want something more based on my age and experience. Why should any of us necessarily be looking to young authors?"
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