Take This Imperishable Literary Form and Shove It

Why I retired from poetry.

Reasons aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. I’ll often do something and then spend time and effort coming up with the reason. Is that introspection? Or is it post-rationalization?

The decision to retire from poetry is like that. And I’ll arrive at the reason near the end. But the place to start is with the decision itself.

One day in 2020, I sat down to make a poem, and I just didn’t want to. When I checked back a week later, I felt the same way. Same after a month and so on. At the time, it wasn’t something I needed to explain. No one was ringing my phone asking for another poem.

The decision has had zero implications for me financially or socially. Still, I checked back periodically on the idea of writing a poem. About five years after finishing my last poem, I feel comfortable saying publicly that I’ve retired.

Metabolism

Writing can be rough. Lots of discouragement, indifference and incomprehension. I seem to give up every afternoon, then go back to it every night. Giving up often is part of how I keep doing it. So, I was surprised that this particular resignation - from poetry - stuck.

Reasoning

You wouldn’t be wrong to ask why I retired. My answer might pertain to your situation as a warning, as advice, or as confirmation of what you may already think. You may want a reason, as you would if your trusted neighbors sold their houses and moved away. I’ll try to oblige.

Pressure

My retirement coincides with an increase in pressure in my life. I’m responsible for the safety and happiness of children. I have less time and need more money. I have a middle-aged man’s simultaneous pride and disappointment at being at the peak of my mental powers, and an acute sense of time running out.

That pressure has resulted in a lack of sleep and a loss of hair. It’s fed a general urgency, but not with poetry. This isn’t why I retired. Not exactly.

Meanwhile in reality

The world, at least America, has moved away from poetry. It’s shunned and mocked the art. It’s forgotten literature, even in the schools. It’s repudiated every basic tenet of the humanities. Why? Survival.

The entire civilization has panicked into cashing in on absolutely everything - nailed down or not - and cashing out on one another. This historical moment doesn’t have time for the polite fiction of caring about something so money-losing as culture, except as a luxury good for the wives, daughters and second sons of the hyper-predators we’re all encouraged to become. This isn’t why I retired, either. If anything, it would seem like poetry might be a good spot to take a stand against worsening state of the collective mind.

My retirement has more to do with what seems to be my own largely inchoate hopes, the fundamental problems of poetry and the place of poetry, all of which have changed radically since I was drawn in, somewhere around the year of our lord 1992.