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    The Broiler Pit 2: More Memories of a Misbegotten Childhood
    The Broiler Pit 2: More Memories of a Misbegotten Childhood
    The Broiler Pit 2: More Memories of a Misbegotten Childhood
    Ebook122 pages34 minutes

    The Broiler Pit 2: More Memories of a Misbegotten Childhood

    By Clyde B Northrup

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    About this ebook

    This second volume of Broiler Pit poems continues to focus on memories of growing up in Idaho's only seaport, Lewiston, during the 1960s and 70s; these poems record feelings of life in a time and place that no longer exist, except in the memory of those who lived through these times, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, most often comical, but different from the world in which we currently reside.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherClyde B Northrup
    Release dateOct 8, 2013
    ISBN9781301731381
    The Broiler Pit 2: More Memories of a Misbegotten Childhood
    Author

    Clyde B Northrup

    Who am I?–a question I often ask myself, without ever coming up with a satisfactory answer: am I just a husband, father, professor, scholar, writer, poet, or some combination that changes from moment to moment, depending on the day, and time of day. . . . Nah, not really–but it is an intriguing way to begin–kind of mysterious and tormented, with a hint of instability that promotes empathy in the reader, and lets all of you know that I am a professor of English, down to my bones, and I cannot help but play around with language. My areas of specialty are 19th-20th century British Literature, the novel, Tolkien & fantasy; my dissertation was on Tolkien’s 1939 lecture “On Fairy-stories” in which he created a framework, as I discovered, for the epic fantasy that I used to critique several modern/contemporary works of fantasy, including Tolkien’s. I have taught at the university level for 14 years. My wife, of 30+ years, is an elementary school teacher.As a poet, I am much like Wordsworth, while as a novelist, I am more like his pal Coleridge, both of which illustrate the influence of my education and areas of expertise. My poems are predominantly narrative in nature, reflecting, no doubt, the overwhelming impulse to tell a story, using the compact, compressed form of the poem to narrate significant moments in the daily life of the poet. As a novelist, my biggest influence is Tolkien, flowing out of my study of his ideas for what he called a “fairy-story” for adults, what we term epic fantasy.

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      Book preview

      The Broiler Pit 2 - Clyde B Northrup

      Author’s Preface

      Every poet since the invention of writing has asked himself (or herself) at some point during his (her) life the same question: why? Why did I become a poet? What happened to me as I was growing up that gave me this gift? Probably the most famous, and longest, answer to this, sometimes futile, question was penned by William Wordsworth, first in 1799, flush with the success of his and Coleridge’s collection, Lyrical Ballads, then again in 1805, and finally in 1850, just before his death, all of them called The Prelude, or Growth of the Poet’s Mind. The final version had 14 ‘books’, each book 400-600 lines long, all in an attempt by Wordsworth to understand what it was about his life, where he grew up, the experiences he had, that formed him into a poet. He tried to single out those events that he thought led directly to his becoming a poet, from his recollections of childhood to his experiences with and reflections on the failed French Revolution, all to determine why he became a poet, and ultimately, share these experiences with future poets to help form, and inform, generations of poets to follow in his footsteps.

      The poems in the collection that follows, and the previous volume of the same name, may indeed be this poet’s attempt to understand why, and what happened to bring him to this point. They are recollections of events and experiences that seem to me to be informative, in all senses of this sometimes slippery word; they are Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’ in which we find wisdom, experiences so powerful that they still appear bright in my mind, although many decades in the past, in a world much different from today. The ‘good times’ of the post-war era giving way to a skepticism in the 1960s and 1970s, a growing mistrust of authority and the established order. The poems in this collection, in some way, record the magic of growing up in a small, northwestern town where children roamed the street freely, unafraid of anything, except the monsters hiding in our closets, or the zombies waiting in the cemetery for Halloween night, or the alien invaders hiding just beyond the horizon. . . . Adventure waited around every corner, and we made everything into an adventure; not all of them pleasant, for sometimes we turned the corner and confronted our local bullies (nothing like the bullies of today!), who twisted our arms and forced us to scream ‘uncle’ as loudly as we could, sending us home to lick our wounds and plan for the next escapade, in which the tables would be turned and we would force the bullies to scream ‘uncle.’ We were limited only by our imaginations, and parental injunctions meant to keep

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