[Glenn Wright]

Innocent

Because he was a home-schooled only child,
and never had a classmate laugh at him
for wanting candy from the Easter Bunny,
or a sister tell him that his science fair project
embarrassed her, he trusted everything
the grownups told him: that his mother could tell
by looking at his eyes if he was lying,
that he could win at any game he chose,
that honesty is the best policy,
that somewhere was a girl who was his soulmate,
that when he died, he’d stand before God’s throne,
and since he was pure, he’d be let into heaven.

He learned the truths of life through disillusion:
that Easter Bunny, Santa, and Tooth Fairy
were simply charming stories for small children,
that he would never be an astronaut,
or score a touchdown in the Super Bowl,
that he would struggle with many limitations,
that cheats and liars are hard to recognize,
that marriage and parenting take a lot of work,
that often the best plans can come to nought,
that all that’s left at the end of our brief lives
is to try our best, and then forgive ourselves
without a guarantee of resurrection.

[Barbara Baig]

I was just thinking today about all the ways there are to use repetition in a poem, and you've demonstrated two of them masterfully here, Glenn. The repeated syntactical structure emphasizes the importance of each statement, and the ideas are repeated (with a different emphasis) in more or less the same order in the two stanzas. The first kind of repetition has a very musical, almost incantatory effect; the second holds the poem together.

I absolutely love the wisdom this poem conveys, as well as its brilliant use of repetition. I will remember this one, for sure. Thanks for writing it.

Barbara

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Barbara—

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Glenn

[Susan McLean]

Glenn, I think the premise of the poem has possibilities, but that it could be made more effective by adding more complexity, by avoiding standard wording (as in "honesty is the best policy"), and by getting at your points more indirectly. What about the lies we tell ourselves? How do we recognize those? Use more metaphors to convert abstract ideas to concrete terms. "Many limitations" is so general. Can you give some examples? Can you imagine ways in which recognizing one's own limitations might have positive effects? It may be that focusing on fewer changes, but in more detail, will have more impact. Do you think it is better to stay naive as a child and have the disillusionment come later, or to be disillusioned while still a child? I am not asking you to answer the questions for me, but if you think about these issues, you may have insights that you can put into the poem.

Susan

[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Glenn!

I like the overall sentiment, but it feels prosaic to me, without many surprises in either the what or the how of what is being said. No imagery or rhyme, just the tick-tock of meter (which you do vary at times, thank you).

Breaking up the blank verse with occasional shorter lines, perhaps rhymed, might help to change that sense of inevitability -- if it's something you decide you want to change. (You may well feel that it's the fulcrum that moves everything in the poem, in which case, keep it, of course.)

[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Susan and Julie—

You both zeroed in on what I, too, see as the main weakness of the poem.
My thinking is that I want the brainless platitudes in S1 to stay. (maybe, as you suggest, Susan, fewer of them). I need to rework S2 to reveal more specifically and impactfully how those guiding principles let him down. I’ll see what I can do to include some figurative language and sound effects.

Thanks for your helpful comments.

Glenn

[Carl Copeland]

Like Barbara, “I absolutely love the wisdom this poem conveys.” I wasn’t an only child or home-schooled, but was brought up thinking I could be anything I wanted and that I was meant to do great things. Open horizons and optimism are, no doubt, good for a child, but at some point, I cracked under the pressure of fulfilling my great potential and was simultaneously lulled into passivity by the belief that love and success would find me no matter what. The issues you raise in the poem run deep with me.

Two mini nits:

A science fair project that would have embarrassed his sister, if he had one, sounds like it has something to do with sexual anatomy, which fits a little uneasily into the head of such an innocent (with his churchgoing parents).

I’d recommend “naught.” “Nought,” though an older variant of the same word, tends to be used in a mathematical context (e.g., “add three noughts”), and my American spell checker doesn’t even recognize it.

[Jim Moonan]

.
I don't mind what some call the prosaic quality in some spots. It does not dip into being didactic. I think the overall rhythm that the line breaks create allow the plain spoken-ness to prevail. A part of me thinks that's what poetry is — plain-spoken expression of complex thoughts (Auden said,“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”) To my way of thinking, There are two kinds of prosaic: ordinary prosaic and enlightened prosaic. This one's enlightened, imo.

I had a radical thought. This is really two poems joined at the hip. I would separate them. One following the other. They are a kind of Innocence and Experience pair. The first stanza describes the armor that parents need to provide to their young children growing up. In the second stanza, reality interrupts and the slings and arrows begin to fly. Beware! Life is not fair.

(There may be a third stanza lurking, waiting to be written.)


.

[Marshall Begel]

Hi, Glenn

I like the idea of mirrored stanzas - 1st stanza: creating the fantasies, 2nd stanza: breaking them. I don't mind the platitudes in S1 as long as S2 has symmetric, concrete reasons for disillusion, like:

there are no glasses-wearing astronauts
his mother lost her savings to a scam

[Hilary Biehl]

I'm having a hard time with this one. Aside from the list-like format and the conventional wording ... is innocence really just believing in the Easter bunny and that you can be astronaut? Is it possible to find a different sort of innocence through our grown-up disillusionment?

I don't know if I can articulate what I mean, but I just keep thinking of Patrick Kavanagh's poem "Innocence."