Childhood

Childhood is a mosaic of experiences - at least in terms of remembered youth. Small crystals of transparent reality, colored by the hue of the moment, past or present, take on an abstract quality when viewed closely: 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 - and who would want to outside of the analyst's couch? - so the personality of youth quite often remains one of refracted reflection, specifics seen only at juxtaposed angles of remembrance. For this reason poetry is the ideal creative medium for attempts to express the childhood experience.

Poetry is art - and art tries not to lose the life within an experience, even while illuminating it. Poetry shares the visual quality of childhood memories; it is a prismatic art. The poet takes an experience and breaks down the living, breathing moment into a spectrum of colors: words - sounds, reality - metaphor, specific - symbol, memory - voice. Like a prism, the poem bends the light of remembrance and separates its shadings; it is a technique-based, almost "scientific" dissection - but, still like a prism, the successful poem pricks from the observer an appreciative "Ah!" of uninhibited recognition.

In "The One Girl at the Boys Party," Sharon Olds' 1983 paean to her teenage daughter's coming-of-age, the "Ah!" comes from the bold juxtaposition of pubescent sexuality into both physical and mathematical te

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m broke down childhood experience into a spectrum through which natural impulse is refracted into numbers, the light-bending shifts to the opposite end of the color band in Garrett Hongo's 1982 autobiographical poem "The Hongo Store/29 Miles Volcano/Hilo, Hawaii." Hongo, an indigenous Hawaiian or Japanese-Hawaiian one derives from the poem and his name, 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 via the scattershot, selective-memory technique (or non-technique) that children themselves employ. Thus, while Olds pursues her math-sex metaphor with relentless, adult design, Hongo's descriptions jump from moment to moment, without apparent regard for overall imagery. He has begun the poem with the intrusion of a natural force upon his family's life, but in the twenty-one remaining lines only three will remember nature

Category: Personal - C