Poetic License: ‘Hazardous To Health’
(Poets die sooner than playwrights. Playwrights die sooner than novelists. And novelists die sooner than nonfiction writers, according to a study by James C. Kaufman, PhD, of California State University. The study appears in the November issue of Death Studies.)
Cover our faces; poets die young —
younger than playwrights and novelists;
essayists, critics and even
creative non-fiction writers.
easily outlast us.
Perhaps we spend too much time
gasping and grasping
in separate ways
at little straws of truth,
tiny epiphanies we hope
will go over big with our brothers
in words, or impress a reader,
listener, reviewer, reporter
who might bother
to come and listen
or shell out money to buy
our slender chapbook collections
that bookstores and libraries
are not ashamed in the least
not to carry.
Or maybe because we know
we will die unread
by most Americans and keepers
elsewhere of the English language
and misunderstood by the few
who brave our dense
impassioned pages —
if we make the top
of somebody’s head come off
somewhere, like Dickinson said,
we’ll almost never get
to witness or hear about it.
And now the latest curse,
this average of dying earlier,
too many early suicides,
Chatterton, Crane and Plath
canceling the occasional nonagenarian
Kunitz or MacLeish.
Tell me, Dr. Kaufman,
if Confessional poets go quickest —
prepared as they always are
to meet their maker,
or if Language poets last
just long enough
to finish the work
that only surviving Language poets
can understand
or do Postmodernists hang on long enough
to hear their poems called “classics”?
I leave these questions
for you and the Journal of Death Studies
to ponder and answer.
At ninety I’m celebrating
that I’m way above the average —
until I remember:
I didn’t write poetry
for fifty years so that
really makes me forty,
forty and sooner or later —
dying young at a ripe old age.
Surgeon General, when will you declare
writing poetry hazardous to health?