Overview

What's It Like To Be Old? offers an anatomy of aging, beginning with the question, what is it like to be old. Individual poems explore a panoply of senior persons and psychologies. Succeeding poems then consider the ways in which older people experience the achievements or failures of aging life. The limits nature places on aging is the subject of the next poems. Ending in a section titled Ripeness, the sequence explores the pains and consolations of accepting old age and death. In this broad consideration of the topic of old age, successive poems use a variety of poetic types and voices, from monologues, satires and comic poems, to meditations, prayers, and myth. Poems laugh or cry over the normal human experience of aging and death; many focus on the joys and pains of waiting.

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Reviews

In What's It Like To Be Old? time, aging, and mortality are the themes of John Maynard, who came to poetry relatively late in his rich literary career. Steady and direct in his focus, the subtitles portray his concerns: ""Consider Old Age,"" ""Seniors,"" ""Evaporating Immortality,"" and ""Ripeness."" This partial list reads like a Maynard poem infused with irony and gentle wry humor. The poems range from raunchy to wistful and while they admit they can't stop the inevitable, ""they can reach out/ To those who might/ Take comfort."" The poet knows the ills, the health challenges, the gripes of old age don't belong to him alone-this is a poetry of sharing. -Barry Wallenstein, poet. Wallenstein's most recent books are Odd Men Out (or In) Xanadu Press, 2025; Playing in Overtime, Ridgeway Press, 2025 ""Age has its quiet triumphs,"" says John Maynard in one of his heartfelt poems. All his adult life Maynard's eyes were turned on others: the Victorians, his students. When the time came to turn his eyes on himself he saw the years were leaving their mark. What then? Poetry was there to light his way. Not as catharsis but as a means of understanding and sharing with others the plights and insights of aging. Painful as his poems may be, every now and then Maynard's special sense of humor shows its tail with sing-song strokes. ""Think how easy it is to find a rhyme,"" he confesses. Or he catches himself ""Repeating rhythms to the nervous pulse of my brain."" Delving into this book you will appreciate what's it like to be old. But a new question arises: ""Who forgot to turn desire off?"" Fortunately there is no answer to that, so the poems-ripe fruits of desire-flow on without flinching. -Luisa Valenzuela, Argentinian late-'Boom' major novelist

Author Information

John Maynard is Professor of English Emeritus at NYU. He has published five non-fiction books, including three with Harvard and Cambridge, and many articles and has done a great deal of editing, including co-editing a journal with Cambridge for 26 years. He won the Thomas J. Wilson Prize of Harvard University Press for his biography of Robert Browning. He has written literary history and criticism, including a study of Charlotte Bronte and sexuality and a work on Victorian sexuality and religion. His latest study was on the theory of reading and readers. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and also a NEH Grant; recently he was given an Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who's Who. He is a member of PEN. During most of his adult life, he wrote some poems and planned to write more. As he neared retirement, he found time to write many more poems. He has been editing them for book publications for the past four years. What's It Like To Be old? is the second of a number of books he has in hand. The first was a set of poems, Armando and Maisie (2025), about the improbable friendship between his dog and a homeless resident of Central Park. That book won the 2026 Book Excellence Award for Narrative Poetry from the Chrysalis BREW Project and also won a Gold Book Award in Poetry from Literary Titan Book Awards. Much of his poetry was written while exploring the park with his dog. The present volume of poems reflects on the diversity of his own and others' experiences of growing old.

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