Today's subject line comes from a poem by Abbie Huston Evans that marymary quoted at Vary the Line. The profile of Huston that M2 linked to is a contemplation-provoking read, especially in tandem with Malcolm Gladwell's essay on types of creativity - particularly the late-blooming kind:

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

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In spite of turning in at a decent hour, I had noooooo energy today whatsoever, so it's just as well that it rained. I did haul myself up to Madison for my appointmet with the the Nashville Talking Library's volunteer coordinator -- they're currently short on readers, and they've been on my things-I'd-like-to-try list for several years, so I'm a-gonna start volunteering for them next month (a weekly Tennessean shift and some young adult books, is the plan).

The BYM and I went to the Family Wash for dinner, and that was nice as well (including the pear cider, mmm).