Blog Archives
What’s It Like To Be Old?
John Maynard’s What’s It Like To Be Old? is a candid, restless, often funny poetry collection about aging as both bodily fact and inner weather. Across sections like “Consider Old Age,” “Evaporating Immortality,” “Limits,” and “Ripeness,” Maynard keeps circling the same hard question from different angles: what happens when the self still feels vividly alive, but the body begins sending smaller, colder messages? The poems move from blunt jokes about pills, poop bags, doctors, and ice cream to startlingly tender meditations on desire, friendship, pain, memory, and the stubborn wish to keep saying yes to life.
I liked how little vanity there is in the voice. Maynard doesn’t smooth old age into wisdom, and he doesn’t turn it into one long lament either. He lets it be ridiculous, sexual, embarrassing, frightened, bored, grateful, and suddenly radiant. A poem like “Jump-Shot Air Ball” could have been only comic, with its missed poop-bag toss and pratfall, but beneath the joke, there’s a real tremor: Is this what decline looks like when it first starts arriving in ordinary gestures? Then later, in “Old Glory,” a flag barely moving in the wind unexpectedly moves, not because of easy patriotism, but because endurance itself has begun to feel mysterious. That emotional turn felt earned to me. The book is best when it catches those small, almost private jolts of recognition.
The writing has a rangy, plainspoken looseness that I found more affecting than polished lyricism would have been. Maynard often favors short lines, singsong rhymes, and conversational pivots, sometimes to comic effect, sometimes to make the poem feel like a thought trying to steady itself while walking. I didn’t love every rhyme or every joke equally; a few pieces lean into bawdy humor or blunt complaint that they feel more like table talk. But even that roughness belongs to the book’s honesty. The ideas are strongest when they resist consolation. In “False Alarms,” the body becomes a series of warnings until one day the warning is real, while “A Sudden Jumping Joy” insists that older people aren’t simply morose, they’re capable of fierce happiness when life grants even three good days, or three good hours. That felt painfully true.
By the end, I felt What’s It Like To Be Old? had done something quietly brave: it had made aging feel less like an abstraction and more like a lived room, cluttered with prescriptions, jokes, losses, appetites, dogs, doctors, memories, and light. The book’s candor gives it weight, and its tenderness keeps returning just when the bitterness might have taken over. I’d recommend it to readers who appreciate reflective, accessible poetry about mortality, especially those interested in the emotional comedy and ache of later life.
Pages: 90 | ASIN : B0GNXK5Q9G
Stories of Our Encounters
Armando and Maisie follow a poet, his dog, and a homeless man whose quiet encounters in the woods of Central Park unfold into a tender portrait of friendship, aging, loss, and the grace of showing up for one another. What inspired you to turn these encounters into poetry?
I had been using the time I spent walking my lovely dog every morning in Central Park to also put together poems in my mind. We often went by Armando’s place in the Ramble Wild area of the Park, and when he was there, we would stop in for a visit. I found the interchange with him so vibrant and fun, especially his friendship with Maisie, which grew by leaps and bounds (they both did do leaps and bounds), that I began to compose poems about them after memorable meetings–not big events but subtle interchanges which interested me. So much in Armando’s life became increasingly vivid to me: his survival in a big city in the outdoors of a park, his easy wisdom about life’s priorities, his connection to animals, dogs, squirrels, coyotes, and birds. My instinct as a poet was to write poems about my gradual exploration of his way of being rather than to try to sum him up; little stories of our encounters seemed an excellent way to use poetry to understand an interesting fellow human and to plot the vagaries in our triple intersection, man, dog, man.
Maisie often serves as a bridge between you and Armando. How did writing about her shape the emotional heart of the book?
The poems show my friendship and respect for Armando. Most of the emotional substance comes from my perceptions of Maisie’s feelings about Armando and his response. I sometimes thought of myself like the Nick Carraway figure in The Great Gatsby, who is a somewhat removed witness to a great romance but therefore has the writer’s insight and freedom. There are central moments of love expressed between them that are major nodes of the story. As often as in great love stories, there are places of absence (Maisie misses him in a number of poems and yearns for him, but the loved one is away). And the hints and then realities of final parting quietly cast a sad emotion over the later poems. The relation of my protagonists gently and in a lesser mode describes the great arc of romance.
Themes of aging and absence surface quietly but persistently. How conscious were you of these themes as you wrote?
As I say above, they provide the overall form of the work, but I was writing in effect on the fly, giving snapshots of their relations as I was seeing them. I really fell into these themes as I found them; they are inevitably present in stories about connections with dogs, who seem tragically to prepare to leave us once they occupy our hearts. Writing about these themes with Armando and Maisie eventually allowed me to express my own sense of going out into the world with an aging dog; poems were written over a number of years, and my company with Armando allowed me to connect little by little with my own feelings of ongoing distance and loss.
How has sharing this work changed the way you think about brief or passing relationships?
I should begin by saying these were not brief or passing relationships. The three of us were involved together for over three years; I am still friends with Armando, who has been kind in his assessment of the poems, even allowed a report in the local paper, West Side Rag. So if anything, it has made me feel that we can find connection in what seem like everyday encounters, and they allow us to have significant relationships wherever we respond to people or animals. These were extraordinary dog and people folk, and they showed me how to show my readers what serious interest in others (or even in their dog treats) can open up for us.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | LinkedIn | Website | Amazon
Armando and Maisie
Armando and Maisie is a tender collection of poems that tells the story of a man who lives mostly in the woods of Central Park and the dog who adores him. The book moves through small encounters between the narrator, his dog Maisie, and Armando. Each poem gives another glimpse of Armando’s gentle philosophy, his odd wit, his hardships, and his unwavering affection for animals. The story grows quietly and steadily. It becomes a portrait of friendship, aging, loss, and the strange joy of showing up for another creature again and again.
As I read the book, I kept stopping to feel the weight of its simple lines. The poet uses plain talk, almost casual, yet the emotion sneaks up on you. I felt pulled in by the mix of sweetness and ache. The writing is warm and steady. It never tries to impress. It just speaks. I liked that. I liked how the poems let small moments breathe. A dog leaning her weight on a man. A red cap in the rain. A squirrel sitting like a regular at a bar. These little things hit harder than I expected. They felt honest and felt close to life.
Armando’s thoughts on time, change, or space might sound whimsical at first, but they left me thinking long after. I could feel the poet wrestling with affection for a man who is both joyful and worn down. I could feel his fear as Maisie ages. I could feel that sinking sense when someone doesn’t show up to their usual bench. The poems made me laugh at one moment and swallow hard the next. That swing in feeling gave the book a raw, authentic quality.
By the end, I cared about these two figures in the woods. I cared about the man who feeds the birds and the dog who looks for him, whether he’s there or not. I’d recommend this book to readers who like quiet stories with a lot of heart. Dog lovers will melt. City walkers will recognize the strange intimacy of passing friendships. Anyone who has lost someone, waited for someone, or loved someone in a simple daily way will find something here that settles in and stays awhile.
Pages: 67 | ASIN : B0FPDP4PKL
