Thinking about family while reading this weeks poems made the poems with children stand out to me. The idea of "family" for me is associated with children and childhood. I started wondering about a child's concept of family and how it relates (maybe mostly subconsciously) to deep realities. My dad has never taken me to El Monte but I know what he means when he talks about different apartments by the street they were on. Presumably, children grow up with their "family" but the stories in these poems tease out what the concept could really mean.
Take Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo's "The Boys of Summer" - Bermejo gives us three stories of boys from different realities. The stanzas stick to a formula, which implies a kind of resolute similarity but that's shattered by content. The more I look at this poem, the more I see that the easiest way to see "family" in it is in terms of giving life? For instance, In Carpinteria, the "golden preteen"'s family isn't even mentioned. He has the ability to smiles and learn lessons on how to be safe, caught in a sunny moment of freedom where he dreams of living anywhere. The boy in Brooks County, Texas, is being sent away for a better life, leaving behind his family, but carrying them with him and their hopes that his life will be free to continue without the fear of being killed. "On a beach in Gaza" starts the reader with the expectation that these boys are enjoying the freedom of playing on a beach like the boy in Carpinteria, but it ends in the tragedy of the parents despair that they couldn't give their boys the freedom to play just anywhere.
Nick Carbó's "Directions to My Imaginary Childhood" takes another perspective on the lines of family, still coming from the association of childhood. This childhood is surrounded by the familiar. The narrator is giving directions to some person floating in an out of languages and colors and landmarks. I'm really drawn in by this poem because of the way it reminds me in sound of a Shel Silverstein poem. The directions lead me back to reality, a reminder that what I'm actually experiencing is reading a poem. But, as we've been exploring in the last few weeks, place is bigger and deeper than just location. What these poems made me think about was how the idea of "family" to a child becomes deeply implicated in place and shared realities, like what "home" is and what it means to leave "home".
I really appreciate your association between Nick Carbo's writing and Shel Silverstien's writing. To me as well, it was so rooted in the details and "shared reality" as you say that it created a mysterious and curious sensibility. As a reader, I got the sense that I would never quite understand the "imaginary childhood" because if the speaker was still attempting to piece it together and that was presumably a figment of his childhood, I would never understand. Are we, as readers supposed to understand?
ReplyDeleteMolly, this is great how you pointed out the children as the definer of how the family in the neighborhood is defined by their presence. They are in the street and in the parade of the community. it makes so much sense. You do some great stuff with craft showing a circular form in Bermejo and the parallels in Carbó--leaving means freezing that place in time (probably for your dad, too)
ReplyDeletee