Drop-in by Mark Antony Owen

This week a drop-in by creator and curator of iamb & After… and one of my favourite poets, Mark Antony Owen, to reflect upon a poem from the latest instalment of his digital-only poetry project, Subruria.

I promised myself, when I began pulling together the first poems that would later become the start of Subruria, that I wouldn’t try to illustrate both the suburban and the rural in the same poem. For the most part, I’ve kept that promise – the project being made up of roughly two thirds suburban poems to one third rural.

Every so often, however, a poem like Childhood these days happens. A poem that encompasses both the suburban and the rural within its span. I don’t recall specifically what sparked its writing. Maybe I was trying to make a nostalgic comparison between the way I grew up in the 70s and 80s and how my kids have grown up over the past 15 years.

What I do remember is that my own boyhood, though not filled with wild adventures, had more of the outdoors about it. Occasionally, that outdoors could be dicey: the time I was hit in the head by a boy with a brick; when an older boy suggested something unsavoury that I now recognise was an attempt at sexual abuse. Don’t let Subruria’s thin veil of bucolicism fool you: there are daisies all right, but also dangers.

I wanted part of Childhood these days to touch on the dangers both I and my children faced as part of our formative years. What I didn’t want was for this tinge of darkness to overshadow my central point: that there was something to be said for the freedoms my generation enjoyed away (sometimes, very far away) from home. Kids nowadays lead such relatively small, overprotected lives. As if the dangers we faced back then were any less prevalent or prolific than they are today. They just weren’t so frequently reported on or talked about 40 years ago.

Imagine my joy, then, when I was handed a gift of a phrase by none other than actor Samuel West. I should stress I don’t know the man personally (though he did record himself reading Childhood these days for his Pandemic Poems series on SoundCloud during the height of COVID-19’s spread). Rather, I heard him in conversation with Samira Ahmed in an episode of her podcast, How I Found My Voice.

The phrase I lifted from Samuel’s lips and set down into Childhood these days is really just two words: ‘benign neglect’. How perfectly these encapsulate the way the Baby Boomer generation parented their Gen X offspring. They didn’t mean for us to come to any serious harm by letting us roam the streets and the countryside by ourselves from breakfast till teatime (no mobiles then to relay our whereabouts). They simply trusted us to go off out and be kids – much as their parents had done with them in the post-war years.

I’ve credited Samuel on social media with coining the phrase ‘benign neglect’. He insists he heard it somewhere else. Whoever said it first, thank you. It was exactly the right phrase to express what I wanted to say about how we were raised; its suggestion of happiness, wellbeing and freedom darkened a little by a hint at something more troubling – something which was never far away from us, wherever we roamed.

It surprises some that Childhood these days, despite its title, is weighted so heavily towards my own youth. This, of course, is deliberate. Only in the fourth stanza do I hint at the ‘suffocations of home’ which dog our children today: the preoccupation with banal YouTube content, imitation of SoCal teens – played out first with toys, then each other. Cramming all this worry (for them as children, for us as parents) into one stifling stanza was my way of juxtaposing my gratitude to society for making us more aware of the dangers today’s young face with an apology to my own kids for what I feel they’ve been denied.

Next week read my review of the stunning new instalment of this innovative online collection.