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Poetic License: ‘Dying Young at a Ripe Old Age’

By JOE PACHECO 2 min read
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PHOTO PROVIDED Joe Pacheco

(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.)

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 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 Emily 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 themselves

be called neo-classical?

These are questions left up in the air

for you and the Journal of Death Studies

to answer.

Whatever their race, color,

station or education —

poetry makes nothing happen

for most people and perishes

easily from their Earth.

Ah poetry, two or more ways to read

any line of it — poetry

does make “nothing” happen,

gives nothing “a local habitation and a name,”

creating from puffs of breath

and ink prints on a page,

the narrative of our species:

Homo Poeticus, Man the Poet,

the pimple on eternity’s rump,

the footnote in the volume of forever,

who dreams up vastness

in the tiniest of spaces

and dies younger

than the briefest of stars.