dispatches from midcareer poeting

 

People often talk about "emerging" and "midcareer" poets, though one might ask what determines these categorizations. If you've never written or published poems before, you can easily be "emerging" into late life. Similarly, of you start early, you can be mid-career much earlier on. That moment in which you pass from one to another is mostly undefined. Is it your few slew of publications? A degree? Your first book?  Your second?  While I would probably consider myself an emerging writer in other genres, like drama or fiction or memoir, I've been writing poems seriously since age 19 (though only really publishing them since I was 24), so I am probably past mid-career in that regard. I published my first chapbook at 30. My first full-length at 32. I earned my MFA at 34. And yet, had you asked me in my 40s, I'd probably have told you it still felt like I was "emerging" into something, I'm not sure what. If the butterfly and the chrysalis is a metaphor, I probably left the cocoon in my third decade. As I write more things now, and less poetry than previous years (though this will change in July when I turn my attention to more Greek subject matter and finish clean drafts of the plays I've been working on since fall.)  I also have half a book I am hoping to finish in the next year after I get out MARRY KISS KILL out this summer., plus a few scraggling smaller projects that will eventually be zines. 

While this has less to do with the actual work, it does mean I have been around the block a few times and seen quite a lot of shit in the time I've been apart of the loose constellation of poetry worlds I've had the chance to inhabit. The work has changed over the years, but every time I think something new feels vastly different, on re-read, it is still very much the same. I don't hate this--if anything I've gotten cleaner, leaner, and meaner in poems. the language is more rhythmic and concise than what I was writing a decade ago. Two decades ago. Three decades ago, I was just finishing up my undergrad degree and writing terrible rhyming poems, so getting toward something good takes time.  

While I would say many of the same obsessions that fueled book number one have similarly fueled this latest book which I am putting the very final touches on as we speak,  I think I am doing them better justice. More sure-footed and intentional than the girl who used to throw things at the wall and see what would stick. But then there are also how the obsessions wax and wane. They feel more fictionalized now, with the series in MKK almost feeling like small stories and worlds placed alongside each other in the whole of the book. The NOLA vampire poems, the Bluebeard sequence, the governess poems. There were definitely books that felt like there was more of me, personally, in them--MAJOR CHARACTERS...felt very much like this. As did FEED and RUINPORN, though there may be the rather obvious reasons for this--both were bread out of a time when I was losing my parents, restructuring my life, and undergoing a lot of strangeness in the world. But I suppose just because the poems are about other people, that doesn't mean I am not in there, rattling around like a rock in the shoe. 

And maybe, my thoughts on mid-careerness are not about the writing at all.  Things have changed greatly in the past decade on how I look at my work and strive to connect to readers. To find the best way to situate myself and my work in a way that seems right, even if it is not the usual, well-trodden path. What I've found there is immensely helpful when it comes to charting paths in new mediums. To look at the scope of the playing field and be able to decide what works for me, what doesn't. What I want and what is not all that important. It's a better state to feeling out the world in, and ill probably be far more satisfying than the years I spent tortuously pondering what kind of poet I wanted to be, what were the rules and punishments for disobeying them. It's actually very freeing. 

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