"The One Girl at the Boys Party" by Sharon Olds and Garrett Hongo

bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,

her maths scores unfolding in the air around her.

This song "remembers" something about being a teenager that most of us forget: the environment of a teenager's life is the rhythm-and-response of tame. Physical urges of an sensual nature are non gone - the boys "tower and bristle," the female child is "smooth and sleek" - but the musk these teenagers respond to is the scent of numbers pool and grades:

Here is where the poem's "memory" of the childhood experience presents us with an loose window into our own experiences of youth. The majority of persons will remember the towering school classroom, math class in particular, for its dullness, a dullness punctuated only occasionally by the sudden tension of a pop quiz or long-feared examination. Math is the ultimate luxuriously school symbol for academic accomplishment: one both can or cannot do it, there is no "faking" the establish or fudging the question of grammar with the excuse of "expressing" oneself. In "One girlfriend at the Boys Party" math is much like devolve on and the teenage passion for it: there is much boring call on the carpet but only one do-or-don't proof of proficiency. This is the tension of youth, a tension this poem captures with a wry, erotic calculation:

sealed, a factor of one, and she will

...

the orchids, ferns and plumeria

And the bark and crackleware of radio news...

If this remembrance of youth takes the general form of a high school experience, the poem shapes it down into even much specific memories. First there is the simplest, most essential of school "tools" that presents the girl necessary to the boys - something to write with:

"Coherency" is perhaps a dangerous term to use when discussing childhood - and meter. The word implies a rational frame of reference that has intellectual obligations. Certainly no one is proposing that all poetry should be irrational or anti-intellectual, but the fact is that neither must all poetry be intellectually rational. Childhood experiences and memories of youth are not always easy to categorize. A memory can make sense - can be "coherent" - with or without principle or intellectual foundation.

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