Adolescence

I asked a few friends what they thought the ages of Adolescence (from Latin adolescere 'to mature') are and got different ranges of age. Even scholars have different views e.g. from 10 to 26. The World Health Organization definition officially designates an adolescent as someone between the ages of 10 and 19. Personally I’d go for from 13 to 18 years old. Mind you, I know people who were born aged 53 and some who are still teenagers at 92.

On looking up the ways that period of life are presented in the arts world of films, plays, books, paintings and sculpture there are so many representations that I decided to stick to the Poets part of Dead Good Poets.

When I was trawling through the internet for examples of poems related to adolescence it wasn’t surprising that there are a lot. But a fair number of the choices referred back to a list made by Dr Oliver Tearle, a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University.

Here is that list in his order:

1  John Clare, First Love
2. A. E. Housman, ‘Oh, When I Was in Love with You’.
3. Claude McKay, ‘Adolescence’.
4. Gwendolyn Brooks, ‘We Real Cool’.
5. Philip Larkin, ‘This Be the Verse’.
6. Seamus Heaney, ‘Blackberry Picking’.
7. Rita Dove, ‘Adolescence I’.
8. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’.
9. Simon Armitage, ‘You May Turn Over and Begin’.
10. Adrienne Su, ‘Adolescence’.

So that was his list but it shows the difficulty in choosing a definitive list as after reading them I’d take out at least four of them immediately and replace by - what? As I said earlier putting Adolescence in Google brought up hundreds of examples by known and unknown poets.

But as expected, at least by me, there were an awful lot of poems related to teenage angst. Take two of the listed poems.

Clare: My face turned pale as deadly pale/ My legs refused to walk away/ And when she looked, what could I ail/ My life and all seemed turned to clay

Armitage: I was dreaming of/ milk-white breasts and nakedness/ or more specifically virginity./ That term - everybody felt the heat/ but the girls were having none of it

Almost a couple of centuries between them and the sexual tension of adolescence screams out.

But...errr...perhaps not everyone went through that sort of experience. Let’s take this example from a poem by a person from Birmingham who went to an all boys’ school in the 1960s:

it’s worrying that/ Bertie Auld would be fit/ for the Villa game/ or would Mom remember
The Victor Annual/ it’s struggling with Latin/ and the sudden choice/ that split the school/
Beatles or Stones

Now that really was angst. I’m told.

'The adolescent brain' by Teresa Ngigi

I went on a cruise to Norway for my 50th. In one of the towns we moored at I came across the graffiti mentioned in the poem below. It could only have been sprayed by an adolescent.

Everything

Hammerfest
the most Northerly town in the world
at a latitude of 70 39 48
although whether numbers
are allowed in poems
I don’t know
but I want them in this
Because I Want Everything
is what was sprayed
on a garage door
in English in Hammerfest

First published by Iota in 2002

Thanks for reading, Terry Q