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Stamina | The Sewanee Review

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As with most things when decided upon at first—a beloved, a political cause, or, in my own case, the writing of poems—it’s easy to think all we have to do is start doing: show love, be politically alert, write poems. Maybe one of the chief values of enthusiasm is its ability to simultaneously energize us toward commitment and render us usefully—for the time—oblivious to the sheer stamina that sustained commitment, what we call a career, requires. Shortly after my first book was published, a teacher of mine told me that having a career in poetry was like riding a runaway open streetcar, that the secret was to hold on tightly and stay aboard, rather than becoming one of the many who get thrown off, into the street. “Keep watching, you’ll see what I mean,” he said. I remember being amused and more than a little horrified by this image, but I’ve come to understand the general idea, and I don’t disagree, not entirely. Thinking back to all of the writers who started publishing around the sam

As with most things when decided upon at first—a beloved, a political cause, or, in my own case, the writing of poems—it’s easy to think all we have to do is start doing: show love, be politically alert, write poems. Maybe one of the chief values of enthusiasm is its ability to simultaneously energize us toward commitment and render us usefully—for the time—oblivious to the sheer stamina that sustained commitment, what we call a career, requires. Shortly after my first book was published, a teacher of mine told me that having a career in poetry was like riding a runaway open streetcar, that th

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