dispatches from midcareer poeting

People often talk about "emerging" and "midcareer" poets, though one might ask what determines these categorizations. If you've never written or published poems before, you can easily be "emerging" into late life. Similarly, of you start early, you can be mid-career much earlier on. That moment in which you pass from one to another is mostly undefined. Is it your few slew of publications? A degree? Your first book? Your second? While I would probably consider myself an emerging writer in other genres, like drama or fiction or memoir, I've been writing poems seriously since age 19 (though only really publishing them since I was 24), so I am probably past mid-career in that regard. I published my first chapbook at 30. My first full-length at 32. I earned my MFA at 34. And yet, had you asked me in my 40s, I'd probably have told you it still felt like I was "emerging" into something, I'm not sure what. If the butterfly and the chrysalis is a metaphor, I probably left the cocoon in my…