Looking for a prompt? It might just be a few years away. For your consideration.
The one from which you’ll never escape?
–Li-Young Lee, “A Hymn to Childhood”
In our adult life, writing as poets, do we find ourselves returning to childhood as a kind of base for who we are, how we’ve become? In your imagination, who was this child? Why is childhood significant? What is the nature of childhood? Is it somehow a frozen place, a place of fixed identity? How do your experiences in childhood shape who you are? One way of writing about childhood is to draw on the memory of an experience.
In Sharon Olds’s poem, “Killing My Sister’s Fish”, the narrator describes the steps taken prior to poisoning her sister’s goldfish and when the deed was done, she was just lying there, “as if without/regret, as if something set in motion/long before I had been conceived/had been accomplished”. The speaker seems to be referring to some sort…
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