Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

My mother groan'd! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:      
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
                     William Blake, Infant Sorrow

Poems written in the first person about childhood experiences are nearly always the strongest poems students bring to workshops.  It's partly because of the freshness of the observation; partly because they capture something of the child's imagination and viewpoint; partly because something of the child's voice seems to shine through in the language.  The difficulty is for a poet to sustain the energy and unselfconsciousness.  It's not technique that gets in the way.  It's more, I think, the adult's embarrassment at the material and the tidying and trimming that begins as soon as you start sifting and sorting memories. 

I've written only a few poems about childhood.  It isn't easy to write about things that will almost certainly be disturbing, and maybe even hurtful to other family members.  I finally stopped altogether when a couple of critics wrote cuttingly about my poem Women's Blood, a vignette of a child caught in the battle between mother and grandmother.  It offended with its references to "gauze-covered wadding pads" and the "strips of rag (my mother) had to wash out every month for herself" and, what must have really made the male critics curl up, "navy-blue knickers/stained with black jelly clots".

You need to have a reason to write lyric poetry:  a force more powerful inside you than inhibitions and self-censorship and fear of outside disapproval.  For the American poet Sharon Olds it was the necessity to speak out, for her own survival, about what had happened in a house where there was abuse.  I love the raw urgency of her writing.  She plunges into poems with the bravery and panache of someone diving into freezing water.  "He lay on the couch night after night / mouth open, the darkness of the room / filling his mouth, and no one knew / my father was eating his children (Saturn) The poem is like the trajectory of  rocket fuelled by the burning desire to tell.  But it isn't merely a stream of confessional pyrotechnics.  The energy is sustained by the richness of its language and imagery, especially by the underpinning with the myth of the god who ate his children.

I imagine that Olds must have been influenced by the earlier American poet, Theodore Roethke. Sylvia Plath certainly was.  Roethke's short poem My Papa's Waltz is one of the most powerful poems ever written about a childhood.  Addressed by the son to the father, it describes how they romp round the kitchen together:

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

The half- rhymes - 'whiskey', 'dizzy', 'easy' - combine with the waltz rhythm of the three-stressed line to help create a sense of out-of- control whirling.  The terrible paradox of the poem is that a parent dancing with a child would normally be very touching, a demonstration of the attachment between them. Here it is literally a dance of death in which every detail adds to the catalogue of damage.  ("At every stop you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle",  'You beat time on my head / With a palm calked hard by dirt.")

Another of the key poems about childhood is Elizabeth Bishop's In the Waiting Room.  Again, it is built up from the child's observations:  in this case as she waits for her aunt at the dentist's.  Some of the observations are so factual and apparently banal ("It was winter. It got dark early") that I've heard it argued that this isn't poetry at all.  The point is that the banal and ordinary is set alongside the extraordinary:  the people sitting in "arctics and overcoats" with images from the National Geographic magazine of "black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs".  Every detail adds to the picture.  But the most astonishing thing about the poem is the way it moves from the outside world to the interior, as the child observes her own position as part of her world, even to the extent of believing her aunt's scream is coming from her own mouth, but also, for the first time, as a dispassionate observer, an 'I' with a separate identity.

For Carol Ann Duffy, another marvellous poet of childhood, the impetus seems also to be the recovery of a time and place, linked particularly with discoveries in the exciting, even dangerous territory of language.  Litany, for instance, is written from the point of view of a suburban child in the Fifties observing her mother and friends and listening in to their conversation:  "A tiny ladder ran up Mrs Barr's American Tan leg, sly like a rumour."  There are several litanies in the poem:  the list of desired household goods in the catalogue that the women pass around;  the litany of whispered gossip and taboo words;  the litany, with the auditory power of an incantation, of the child's recital of the women's names:  'I'm sorry, Mrs Barr, Mrs Hunt, Mrs Emery, sorry, Mrs Raine.'

The ordeals and powerlessness of childhood make for compelling and dramatic poems.  But it is possible to write poems about happy childhoods.  I missed my stop once on a swaying Tube reading Seamus Heaney's poem The Railway Children over and over again:

We thought words travelled the wires
In shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

A poet as good as Heaney can get away with preserving moments of childhood memory in poems that have the resonance and radiance of icons.  But even Wordsworth didn't really believe in "the trailing
clouds of glory" version of the child.  The first book of The Prelude is as full of guilt and fear and transgression, as it is of rapture.  The boy who plunders birds' nests and steals a boat, is both drawn to lonely places and terrified of them.  The poems about childhood that I most admire are true to these contradictions, and resist the temptation to iron out memory.  They are closer to Blake's vision of the child as "like a fiend hid in the cloud', reporting with a fierce gaze and honest voice from the battle-zone I think childhood is.