The 30 Poems in 30 Days series is written by John Hewitt. When I came across the site I did not realize that I in fact just barely missed this year's edition of it. As a result, I am starting at 2007, at the beginning. Quotes come directly from Hewitt, and thanks to him for the work and effort her has put into this.
Why You Should Write
"...the best reason to write poetry is because it is something you enjoy doing or at least it is something you get some sort of emotional or spiritual benefit from doing. There is no other good reason to write poetry."
Today's Assignment
"Write a poem about your childhood. Explore an actual event that has some emotional significance to you. Avoid using any description of how you felt about the event then or how you feel about it now. Instead, try to make the emotion of the event come through in your descriptions of what happened."
For me this is a struggle. My childhood memories are like a small stack of Polaroids that you could flip through and see a sort of staggered motion. My happiest memories lie very independently from the events that surrounded them. I spent a lot of time noticing that my life was not like the family you saw on TV. There were no home videos. There are snapshot after snapshot of posed pictures and forced smiles, that give no real insight into the reality of our life. I struggle to make sense of the fragments, of the images, of the stop-motion clips that comprise my childhood. In On Writing, Stephen King expresses his own frustrations with the inadequacies of his childhood memory.
"Mary Karr [author of The Liars' Club] presents her childhood in an almost unbroken panorama. Mine is a fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees . . . the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you."
Somehow I must find a way to weave the images together in some sort of significant single event. My childhood memories, especially elementary age ones, are the hardest of my life. I didn't suffer horrible physical abuse,
nor was I faced with a neglectful parent due to substance abuse. Yet I did suffer, mostly but not exclusively, at the hands of my peers. There are times I refuse to be tormented by those memories. I am sure there were many amazing and positive memories but my subconscious does not hang onto to those. Except for maybe a lone tree that was my refuge in my grandparents yard. It represents for me everything my life was not. Every iconic image media tells you belongs to family and childhood.Now I work and toil to bring about something from the depths. I will look at what I have written here and what I have left out. And later today I will post the results. What about you? Do you have relevant events from your childhood that stick out like thorns or mountains of triumph?
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