A note from the Young Crones Club

Image via http://mahan.wonkwang.ac.kr/
Rare: an image of a medieval woman artist at work.

The glorious thing about being in the Young Crones Club is that suddenly you know well people of all ages. Of course, everybody knows about the down sides (like an over-cut diamond, growing older has many sides. I also think knowing a lot of people of many ages comes from living in a village setting, where the ages are not separated out and compartmentalized, as they often are in a city.)

It's a curious time of life, the time of the Young Crone, when children are struggling to fly outside or inside the nest, when parents are growing old and sometimes dying, when duties and requests for volunteer work increase madly when it seems they ought to lessen, and when the plain fact of growing older tells the writer (this one) to hurry up and finish all those almost-finished things strewn around the writing room. And then what? To dream of beginning a new work, death-defying and magnificent... Because every writer of any potency has the dream burning in the brain.

"Now let us sport us while we may; / And now, like am'rous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour." Words are sexy, fecund, powerful, and joyful: so Marvell sported in words with his would-be lover, the famous Coy Mistress, and made of desire that flies a kind of monument. And so we readers and writers may aspire to sport and rejoice through words--losing and finding ourselves in a more intense life.

P. S. Just peeked to see if I had written about the Young Crones Club before--and yes, I have (yes, the mind must be going!) And stumbled on this while I was at it: Joy in Poetry.

P. P. S. Thanks to Jenny B for including A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, The Throne of Psyche, and The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins on her list of recommended summer reads. Also included are books and chapbook by real life and e-life friends Dale Favier (never met but want to meet!), Robbi Nester (met in college), and Fiona Robyn (met in Wales in 2010.) And, of course, I can't leave out the poets in The Book of Ystwyth; I've been lucky enough to meet Dave Bonta, Damian Walford Davies, Callum James, and Andrea Selch in Wales, and I often feel that I know Clive's friend, the late Catriona Urquhart. It's a beautiful book, packed with Clive's images and well worth owning.