Review: Second Childhood

Howe, Fanny. Second Childhood. Graywolf Press 2014.
Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller

Childhood is the ultimate fantasy of adulthood. After experiencing the absurd tediousness of working-class life, the boundless simplicity and freedom of childhood becomes not just nostalgic, but materialistically enticing. Fantasizing for childhood extends beyond materialist desires, as well. "The Three Metamorphoses" of Nietzsche's Zarathustra imagines a child as the culmination of a human spirit's growth into extra-moral superhumans. There is something weightless and innocent to childhood that makes its perspective attractive--to poets, philosophers, and people in general. Since her intriguing reflections on bewilderment, faeries, and more (from The Wedding Dress), one could perceive Fanny Howe as one such poet attracted to childhood. Her short collection Second Childhood reinforces this without compromising her weave of imagination, multiculturalism, and determination to ask questions without answers.

The style of Howe's poetry contains elements of both aphorism and personal reflection. "Progress" shifts from sharp, conceptual statements ("Possibility/ is one of the elements./ It keeps things going.") to recollections of specific moments:

We drop the shadows where they are then
return to them
when the light has grown heavy.

You'll take your time lugging the weight into
our room
or stand over there in the shade.

A transitionary period glues the two together, preoccupying the voice of the poems; at once desiring the prospects of a second childhood, as well as worrying we may be too late to reach a second childhood. Howe manages both tones without anxiousness or concern, oddly enough. Her poetic sentiment begins as abruptly as it ends, sometimes without bothering to answer the questions it founds.

"Loneliness" ponders "if you figured out why you chose [loneliness], years later, would/ you ask it to go?/ How would you replace it?" Rather than offering a straight answer, Howe connects loneliness to shame, concluding that "loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems/ to need a little more time on its own." Her poetry possesses insights as biting as those difficult questions children ask adults, who can never seem to answer them. Rather than drawing a hard generational perspective, however, Howe presents both perspectives for their particular strengths. Combining the adult's hesitation to settle for answers with the child's unflinching curiosity for them, Second Childhood directs us towards what seems like an intellectual compromise. The childlike sensibilities directing our search for truth rarely contributes towards the sober realizations of the world adulthood scaffolds as too rigid for change. In spite of this, Howe's second childhood neither worships children's innocence nor celebrates the wisdom of the elderly, without settling on anything other than an insistence to continue asking questions.

One senses in her poetry echoes of Frantz Fanon's exclamation to "always be a man of questions!" Given her essay on "Bewilderment," this likely strays close to her poetic intent in Second Childhood. Writing for a poetics of bewilderment, Howe writes:

Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.

It breaks open the lock of dualism (it's this or that) and peers out into space (not this, not that). (The Wedding Dress 15, University of California Press)

"Bewilderment" argues for a conceptual questioning without any interest in the answers, founding itself against resolution to elevate a mystic vertigo. Howe's desire "to never grow up" thus reflects a similar poetics to those she espouses in "Bewilderment." Her innocuous, often grounded images of domestic life are frequently accompanied by gods and other spirits. "Second Childhood" describes the gods and goddesses as "the last good/ grown-ups on earth," as the voice of the poem watches them "walking to a party along a beach... laughing and calling to each other." To reach a second childhood it would seem necessary to let in the possibilities opened by different faiths; as well as having at hand "a broom, rosary, or/ cane to wave them away." Listen to one spirit too long and familiarity spoils the magic of losing yourself. For as Howe quotes Michel de Certeau in "A Vision," mysticism "provides a path for those who ask the way/ to get lost./ It teaches how not to return." Disorientation, in the sense of her bewilderment, is impossible with strict roots.

Second Childhood presses--playfully--for an adulthood that returns people to childlike inquisition, and liberate ourselves of the "stakes" adulthood has driven into the earth. Howe presents this philosophical, and potentially political, image of second childhood as a return to belonging nowhere, to an existence that only needs "to know that the sun turns/ around the earth/ and everything else at the center of the universe." In so doing, she reveals that what drives us more to emerge in the world is never an understanding, or a desire, or a location, but an unflinching dedication to catch a glimpse of what remains forever invisible. Perhaps this suits us better.