Master Class—The View from Childhood
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Celebrated fiction writer Flannery O’Connor once quipped: "Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days." O’Connor, of course, is right. As children we experience the world with an intensity that is unmatched by any other period of our lives. The people we know, the events that occur, and the places we live and visit leave an indelible impression upon us. It is a profound mystery to me why I have difficulty recalling what I had for dinner last night, but I can recall with perfect precision where I sat in my kindergarten class, the freckled face of the boy who sat next to me (Robert Lampman), and the way my pretty teacher, Mrs. Brislin, wore her shiny black hair in a dippity do flip. Childhood is a country we are born into and, inevitably, must leave, but we bring with us souvenirs that never leave us. They remain inside of us the whole rest of our lives.
For this reason, childhood presents to us an inexhaustible wellspring of poetic possibility. This Master Class will focus on poems of childhood; more specifically, poems in which poets see the world through the eyes of a child. There is, of course, a long and hallowed history of childhood poems written in the English, a genre which has been explored most powerfully from the Romantic period onward. We will consider poems ranging from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” through Wordsworth’s poems about his idyllic childhood in the rural north of England, through to more contemporary accounts of childhood by poets such as Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, D.H. Lawrence, Countee Cullen, Daniel Tobin, and, of course, Robert Frost. We will also read and write our own childhood poems. The workshop will include both in-class poetry prompts and careful consideration of poems brought by the members of the class.
We will discuss some of the hallmarks of childhood poems (binocular vision as we attempt to see through both a child’s and an adult’s eyes); the power of image and symbol to the mind of a child, and the inevitability of ambiguity, among others. We will also discuss some of the challenges of writing in the genre: the risk of sentimentality; creating an authentic voice by means of diction, syntax, and idiom; finding a suitable form; the ethics of writing about family members; the (un)reliability of memory; and dealing with potential trauma.
The workshop is open to both beginners and practiced poets. Anyone who has survived a childhood and wants to write about it is welcome.
