[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.

[stephenspower]

Although this is a sonnet, I like how a shambling meter fits the helter-skelter aspect of the poem. That said, the lines with 12 syllables seem too much and the one with only four feet too little. A mix of 9 and 11 syllable lines, all with 5 feet, would work better to show the straining against constraints while satisfying the reader's expectations of a sonnet.

The volta is clever and subtle.

I get the symbolic value of the watch and the return to time, but it's kind of lost in the last line because it's never mentioned before, plus "this list," which also isn't mentioned before (and where did it come from), is put on a par with "this watch" by the parallel "this." Which are we to focus on? If the concluding couplet were in straight iambic pentameter, that would reinforce the message too. I'd lose "the list," personally, because it suggests a different, if related, theme (responsibility, chores) than the watch (the organizing of careless time).

Perhaps the title could refer to the watch in some way so the reader's waiting for it: "Sprung"? "Unsprung"?

[Janice D. Soderling]

This appeals to me and not only because I was a tomboy. My reading is somewhat different though. I hear a silent "Oh" starting the poem and when in the closing couplet I reach "and this list /of errands on a notepad, this watch on my wrist", I move from the past to the present to hear the sigh of the woman that girl became, a woman ruled by a To-Do list and time constraints. I am not saying that my reading is the "correct" one, I'm simply making the point that a good poem has some built-in ambiguity, something for everyone to interpret and take away.

Some people do still wear wrist watches, it is more polite to glance discreetly at an inner wrist than to constantly be staring at that hideous little rectangle that advertises the dullness of present company.

The sonics are gorgeous—the alliteration and consonance never feel forced, each sound recurring in a nearby word; brake of the bus, down drive, torn, red, garter, glance, shift saved. At the volta we jump not only the fence but from mad action to inaction, meals served without one's own effort, time passing smoothly as a garter snake, before the couplet returns us to present day demands.

Lovely work.

[marly youmans]

I like the idea of pellmell motion for this subject, but I must be a terrible literalist because I was stopped by "To shift." For a second I thought it was an odd verbal form of "shift" as in dress because it is so close to the zippered dress. Then I thought she was driving for another instant--"to shift" gears and then brake. It took my third thought to get to the right meaning. Admittedly all that tripping over meaning happened in a flash, but I don't think it was helpful, rather like tripping over the starting block in a race.

However, I may well be quite, quite mad. Do like the whole idea for the a short poem, that sort of 100-yard dash structure.