"Amy Lowell says: "Poetry seems to be, for strange reason, a young man's job". This slapped me in the head like a big heavy cold dogfish. Poetry is a young man's job. What a frighteningly true thought. Poetry is like math or chess or music - it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kinds of brain don't last. Sometimes if you can hold on into old age you can have another late flowering, like Yeats - much of adulthood crumbles and fall away, and you're left with highly saturated early memories and a renewed urge for rhyme. But that happens rarely"
(Nicholson Barker, "The Anthologist")
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