Childhood & Poetry
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Childhood is a mosaic of experiences - at least in terms of remembered youth. The mosaic only takes on meaning when pieced together and viewed from a distance. Very few people can actually witness their past from a distance, however, so the personality of youth often remains one of specifics seen only at the angle of remembrance. For this reason poetry is the ideal creative medium for attempts to express the childhood experience. Poetry shares the visual quality of childhood memories. The poet takes an experience and breaks down the moment into words and sounds, realities and metaphors. The poem bends memory. It is a technique-based, almost "scientific" dissection - but, still, the successful poem pricks from the observer an appreciative recognition. In "The One Girl at the Boys Party," Sharon Olds' 1983 poem on her teenage daughter's coming-of-age, the recognition comes from the juxtaposition of pubescent sexuality into both physical and mathematical terms. When I take my girl to the swimming party I set her down among the boys. They tower and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek, her math scores unfolding in the air around her. Olds remembers something about being a teenager that most non-poets forget: the environment of their lives is the rhythm-and-response of school. Physicality of the animal sort is not gone - the boys "tower and bristle," her daughter is "smooth and sleek" - but the perfume these teenagers respond to is the scent of numbers
. . .
not. Her daughter's mathmatical "come-on" turn with the boys at the swimming pool is only temptation, never seduction. How could it be? It is all performed under Mom-the-poet's all-seeing eye.
While Sharon Olds' poem broke down childhood experience into a high school metaphor where natural impulse is represented by numbers, the experience of memory shifts to the opposite end of the poetic effort in Garrett Hongo's 1982 autobiographical poem "The Hongo Store/29 Miles Volcano/Hilo, Hawaii." An indigenous Hawaiian or Japanese-Hawaiian one assumes from the poem and his name, Hongo places raw nature at the center of his recollection of childhood experience - specifically, a volcano:
My parents felt those rumblings
Coming deep from the earth's belly,
Thudding like the bell of the Buddhist Church.
Tremors in the ground swayed the bathinette
Where I lay squalling in soapy water.
More than Olds, who filters her remembrance of youth through an observation of her daughter and friends, Hongo attempts to recreate childhood experience using the scattershot, selective-memory technique (or non-technique) that children themselves employ. While Olds pursues her math-sex metaphor with relentless, adult design, Hongo's description
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Approximate Word count = 1461
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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