Review by Jessica Goodfellow
What Books / October 2021 / 232 pages
Members of the Los Angeles Glass Table Collective consider the topic “late-stage writing” in the essay collection What Falls Away is Always: Writers Over 60 on Writing & Death. The title was taken from Theodore Roethke’s oft-quoted villanelle “The Waking,” while the subtitle suggests that these two favored subjects of all writers can be expertly addressed by the over-60 cohort. Since they have attained “more than a thousand years of writing among us,” surely they must have enhanced experience with both writing and death, must have “learn[ed] by going where I have to go,” to borrow a refrain from Roethke’s poem.
A 2019 AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference panel on this topic sparked the collection. The first four essays, written by the original panel members, are described in the attending catalog as a response to the prescient realization that “The body, like the world, is a dangerous place.” Enthusiasm for the panel resulted in the collective’s decision to assemble this volume; however, the second section is colored by the advent of the pandemic, so that the world and the bodies in it, one’s own and those of others, have become ever more dangerous places. As Diane Seuss writes, “This little essay was going to be one way. Now it has to be another way. […] I could be semi-wise about writing toward death when death was not a looming reality. Now I’m wiping down my mail with bleach.”
Smack in the middle of my own fifties, coping with both a newly emptied nest and menopause in the midst of a pandemic, struggling in solitude with whether my current poetry manuscript is “relevant,” I am always looking for advice on how to live the dwindling remainder of my days and how to write despite this awareness. This volume of short essays (averaging four pages each) seemed exactly what I needed. I would learn strategies for how to thrive as an aging writer, I supposed.
But that’s not exactly what happened. I did learn many things about writing. For example, Martin Lindauer writes informatively about late-stage creativity, both in those who discover their muse late in life and in those whose styles radically change in their later years. Mark Irwin makes the insightful observation that “The manner by which poets shape space and time becomes much more complex and architectural as they age,” as he considers the recent work of Arthur Sze. Patrick Bizzaro analyzes the last poems of poets to find recurring themes of regret, defiance, acquiescence, and reconciliation with God. About late-stage writing, Gail Wronsky counsels, “[I]n the late work, there is an intersection between detachment and desire. Desire, the flame that feeds the work of young writers doesn’t disappear, isn’t satisfied; one simply has some distance from it.” Or, as Anne Carson wrote in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, “Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.” About the endings of poems, Mark Irwin observes “As I continue to age, I often feel an anxiety when ending a poem, something experienced near the final stanzas, though I have no idea what those lines might be…It is a ‘great responsibility’ to end a poem, just as it is to think of people no longer here.”
Advice on how to live as an older writer also resonated with me. Rod Val Moore—whose “Dance Macabre Manifesto,” a list of literary references to metaphors based in dance, is one of the highlights of this collection—reveals, “I do abandon, cheerfully…a certainty that…the craft of language is my truest and best means of fulfillment. Now…I also find fulfillment in the absence of writing…in exercising my duty to…lyrically and simply exist.” Joy Manesiotis writes about the invisibility of older women in culture, and the erasure of older women in the writing field, alongside the story of her house catching on fire. As a way of responding to these injustices, Manesiotis makes this important distinction: “Writing now, as it has always been, as sustenance and resistance: ambition placed in the work, rather than for the work.” Holaday Mason writes about ugliness and aging, dependency and powerlessness, pain and decrepitude, but still can observe, “It is frightening to face limits, to look in the mirror, to run towards extinction, not from it. But now it seems more frightening to run away and risk missing the show.”
I turned to this collection for wisdom, and I although did find myself nodding along to certain passages, I didn’t read anything that radically altered my understanding of how to approach aging as a writer or as a human. What I found instead was comfort: comfort in the company of writers who go before me. Bret Lott writes, “But I have tired of the way what I intend to write is never what I write, and what I write is never what I intend.” To hear an esteemed author describe this familiar, disconcerting struggle allowed me to exhale a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. And then there’s this hard-won realization of Michael Ventura, illuminating the connection of the writerly life to the human life: “To accept the mystery of oneself…That’s fuck-all tough…But the writing self…I accepted the writing self without question when I was too young even to realize it was happening. […] Took me a lifetime to grasp that. This, alone, is proof to me of the worth of growing old.”
This book offers other delights to the reader: the baseball metaphors and haiku offerings of E. Ethelbert Miller; Nils Peterson’s moving piece about how we are losing not only friends one by one, but also the versions of ourselves that each friend elicits; and Laurie Blauner’s gorgeous vignettes about death, the dead, and ghosts. Kim Addonizio writes of the collective but separate evening gatherings in the early days of the pandemic: “The howling of my neighbors lasts less than five minutes. We can’t see each other, and I’ve never met any of them, but it heartens me to hear them.” The same can be said of how I relate to the writers in this volume. Over the years I’ve read work from nearly all of them, though I’ve never met any of them. But their brief howling in this present and encroaching darkness heartens me, and perhaps will do the same for you.
Jessica Goodfellow’s poetry books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala (2015), and The Insomniac’s Weather Report (2014). A former writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, she’s had poems in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Scientific American, Verse Daily, Motionpoems, and Best American Poetry 2018.