Contributor’s Marginalia: Michael Bazzett responding to Eleanor Stanford’s “I too had a childhood”

Sometimes when you’re reading a poem, it can feel like it’s writing itself. Like each word generates the one that follows, and nothing else could arrive but…

…the very word that arrives. And the next. And…

…the next.

That’s how I felt when I first read this poem by Eleanor Stafford. Within mere syllables, the poem’s translucence and immediacy had me looking through the strange, clear eyes of childhood. The sparrow getting caught in the stove vent that somehow leads to having a brother. It feels causal. And this dream-logic of childhood is so beautifully buoyed by the propulsive sing-song of slant rhymes, repetitions and echoes (caught/vent, brother/another/father, then/let in, let in/another brother) all I want to do is let the music of this world carry me gently down the stream…

Part of this propulsion stems from the fact that seven of the poem’s first nine lines are enjambed, nine of its first twelve, twelve of its twenty overall. Only two of those enjambments are what I sometimes think of as “head-fake line-breaks,” those that occur at syntactical moments where both thought and line could plausibly be finished (My mother bathed us, We believed we were living) before the turn of the line draws out a new meaning, one that feels both more and less complete.

The rest of the breaks occur at resolutely unfinished moments, leaving the reader with unknowns that can only be made known by following the thread and moving through time, a wonderfully mimetic move where we are catapulted back only to tumble forward; the sentence of life persists.

I only noticed these lovely, crafty moves in hindsight, though. The poem’s too good to show its seams, and I’m sure I’ll return to it. I too was a child of the 70s, bathed in a tin tub in the backyard, served as a crossing guard, felt the hovering cloud of the hostage crisis during the Carter presidency, and was fascinated to read in my local newspaper that, living in the jungles of Peru, there was a group of guerillas called the Maoist Shining Path. The world was simple and strange and I believed myself, like most children, into being alive. How lovely and deftly Stafford illuminates the path back (and forth) to that moment.