[Gail White]

Childhood


To shift all day in a zippered dress, then tear
from the brake of the bus, down the gravel drive, and leap
the back steps, slam the storm-door, take the stairs
two at a time, and fling the dress in a heap
on my bedroom floor, ease into my brother's old
T-shirt I'd saved from the Goodwill bag for mine,
frayed shorts, the torn red sneakers my mother had told
me to throw away, slam out again
and jump, both boy and girl, the chain-link fence,
just lie without a purpose in the loose
soft grass of the field, letting a garter snake glance
my hand on its passage, before my mother's voice
reached me, calling supper, and this list
of errands on a notepad, this watch on my wrist.


[Gail White]

CATHY CHANDLER'S COMMENT: One might be tempted to groan, Oh, no! They’re starting off the bakeoff with another sonnet about childhood! But this is not just another heavy, plodding, trip down memory lane. This sonnet (though I admit the title needs more spark!), through its breezy metrical liberties, mix of slant and perfect rhyme, evocative verbs, fine enjambments and inspired volta, brought me back to small-town Pennsylvania in the early 60’s, where one Cathy (albeit with no brothers from whom to borrow a T-shirt!) lay in the grass with a prized and bought-with-great-sacrifice Timex watch, her frazzled mother calling her in, knowing full well Cathy probably hadn’t made it to the corner store to buy that half-pound of chipped ham, bread, and Comet cleanser. This sonnet breathes.

[Gail White]

This one-sentence sonnet moves at the headlong pace of the girl dashing off the bus, through the house, and out into the yard for some total relaxation before the summons to dinner and errands. Although I was never one to let a snake brush my hand without screaming, I found this sonnet a perfect evocation of life at about age 12, as well as a masterpiece of pacing.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Well, any thoughts on content aside, I'm a little surprised to see this included in a sonnet bakeoff. Perhaps I'm a little too traditionalist in my take on what constitutes a sonnet, but the shambling meter, the overt liberties taken with rhyme, and the lack of a discernible volta make me scratch my head a bit. I suppose, since it's 14 lines, and roughly in the Shakespearean rhyme scheme, a case can be made for its inclusion...but I'm simply not one who would make that case.

In terms of content, I'm left pretty cold as well. Stream of consciousness has its place, but this particular example strikes me as too slipshod to be effective. If this was one of the metrical forums, I'd go into greater detail, but suffice it to say that this poem leaves me wanting a lot more on several levels.

[Roger Slater]

Overall I found this to be excellent, beautifully paced and observed, but I do confess to a very slight disappointment in the ending. Before reading Cathy's comment I really didn't get the nostalgic value of the watch on the wrist, and that's the detail the poem closes on, but even after I "got" it, I still sort of wished the poem had gone a bit further and given us that last-minute volta that Shaun mentions.

I also spent a nano-second being confused when the word "list" came up, since the poem itself is a list and that was the first list I thought of.

Yet all my minor objections tend to dissipate after a couple more readings, once I have learned what not to expect and to accept the poem on its own terms, terms which offer a great deal to admire.

[John Whitworth]

Young people nowadays don't wear watches. My first watch was one of those big things with a chain. God, am I that old? It was my grandfather's. Wearing a wristwatch (an expensive item then) is something that places you in time and space. I still wear a wristwatch, would feel extremely uncomfortable without it.

[Maryann Corbett]

A suggestion: the watch on the wrist represents the reimposition of time and schedule and order and life's demands, everything that the girl has been escaping and resisting from the beginning of the poem until it turns on the mother's voice, and the list of errands, and the watch.

I wonder whether we should understand that the mother calls and then the list is handed over and the watch put on. I can't insist that this reading is correct, but it sneaks into my mind.

And hurray for the ability to let us feel meter without bashing it out like a metronome.

And a second hurray for slant rhyme.

And could a poem with this theme and content realistically be anything but loose? A stricter form would unsay it.

[Julie Steiner]

Everything Maryann just said.

With the addition that, for me, the mother's voice surreally calls the daydreaming narrator to the present. Not the present back then, but the present now, with its adult (and often gender-specific) responsibilities, where "this" list and "this" watch reside.

So, for me, that's the turn--when it's no longer the mother calling the child back from daydreaming, but the demands of motherhood calling the adult back from daydreaming.

[S. A. Wyatt]

Childhood

I like the run-on, one-sentence feel of it - really captures the non-stop excitement of childhood. However, I would argue that the "sentence" is really more of a fragment, a fragment that would be completed by a title of "Childhood is. . ." The image of a garter snake over the hand is very appealing (and cringeworthy at the same time), and I also like just the idea of the "lie without purpose" - the play on lie, etc - as the child is certainly lying to the parent about what she is doing, or not doing, in the case of the list of errands.

I think this is a short piece that most of us could relate to - at least, I know that memories of my childhood were evoked during the reading of this poem. I like the notion that the child, though obviously a girl, is seen as more androgynous, both boy and girl, which I think also captures the essence of being a child. The volta is present as a physical division - the fence that is jumped over - that fence that also represents the division of the child's world from the world of the adults (mother, school, etc.).

I think it is clever and well done. I am excited to see what else comes along.

Sean

[Nigel Mace]

I'm absolutely with Shaun on this one. One can only feel the metre, in Maryann's phrase, in this as one might fumble for a balustrade on a gloomy stairwell. There is nothing bashed out, as Maryann's phrase suggests, about the great heritage of sonnet poetry that actually observes a proper metrical form and to suggest that this is merely metronomic seems to me rather silly. As to this entry's 'fine enjambments' they not only seem to me to mess up any sense of flow in the verse, but also result in some not very sensible/grammatically convincing phrasings, e.g. the 'frayed shorts' now somewhat distantly related to their verb. Nor is this truly, as claimed, a single sentence, e.g. the disconnect between 'fence,' and 'just'. Not what I'd recognise as a sonnet and not one for me, I'm afraid.