Every once in a while poets on the internets throw around the term "mid-career." I still sometimes struggle to grasp what it means, at least to me, when it feels like so much of your poetry efforts seem to always, even several years, several books in to make a name for yourself and find readers. It gets no easier, and maybe it even gets harder. So much of the shininess of being young and precotious, a fresh new voice, fades out. Even opportunities are less--all those first book contests and young poet prizes no longer an option. Some poets hit real hard in their mid-late 20's and are never heard from again.
In any other kind of career outside the arts, there are expectations. It will hard to find your footing at first, pay your dues, establish yourself. By whatever you define as the middle of your career, you'll have some stability--or at least the feeling that the boards of the dock are not constantly slipping out from under you. Honestly, I do not know a single poet for whom this is true. You might find stability--in teaching, in other sorts of day-job endeavors, but poetry, and even more so poetry bizness, is a tricky mistress--one who you do not always know will be there for you. In fact, may have left you for the next new thing.
I mentioned over the weekend the feeling that it's so very hard to follow the mantra "Do what you love!" when it doesn't always love you back. By mid-career, which probably coincides with middle age unless you got started later, you've seen a lot. You've done a lot. You're probably near the top of your game, or as close as you'll ever be. You might have even had some success--maybe even buzzed happily along for awhile, convinced you were rowing just fast enough, and surely, the rapids were approaching--just enough to speed you along into something like a success and adoration. But there were no rapids. Or they were harder than you expected and just dumped you into the drink entirely. Maybe you successfuly built a sail, but there was no wind. (Forgive the endless boating analogies..I spend considerable time looking at boats on my commute everyday.) Or you made it to the rapids, but there were so many other boats you capsized before you got through.
So you float. Neither here nor there. I hear so many poets talk about this, even those a decade younger. You have the skills to tie a knot and mount a sail, but you haven't seen another ship for miles, let alone caught a fish to sustain your hunger, which probably just gets bigger and bigger. I think the pandemic caused a lot of people to leave the river entirely. I almost did, or maybe I even sort of did. Two years ago, I would have described this all differently. I could hear the rapids. Now I'm convinced they don't exist as anything but a mirage to keep you rowing.
What to do with this, once you make that realization, I don't know. I still love the river, still love poems and readers and building things from words. Maybe a reconsideration of how I build my boat and where I really want it to go was in order. What my priorities are to be as I begin to traverse this second half of something like a career. If this is the middle, there is so much behind me, but also, hopefully, fate willing, so much ahead. I'd rather not spend it waiting for wind that never comes.
