Down the Middle with a Nickel: a memoir of a West Virginia childhood in poems

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To revisit childhood in one's sixties through the twin lenses of memory and poetry is a journey at once of both delight and peril. When I began to write--inspired by many other poets before me--from memory, I had an opportunity to grapple with happenings I had long held , but had never quite figured out. The poems allowed me to do that--at least in some measure.

As I began to write more poems from that time in my life, I realized more and more that the book was not just about me and my immediate family, but about West Virgina: the seasonal agricultural workers never quite defined as such, the legacy of the coal mines, the rural poverty. It also became about the entire era of the fifties: into my own personal memories crept the polio epidemic and the administration of the Salk vaccine, the first nuclear testing shown on television , the legacy of WW II veterans returning to start life anew in their small GI bill suburban houses, beginning families that would become tainted by what they had endured.

And so the volume took shape. Several poems from my earlier full-length collection, "Planting Bulbs in a Time of War, and Other Poem , already dealt with similar subject matter: "Just Rewards," "Blue Ribbon," and "Perihelion," and I consider them part of this body of work as well. What I ended up with is for me bitter-sweet: I feel for the girl I was in her scratchy school dresses drawing the birds of West Virgina in order please her father: I see in her the birth of the poet I would become; I still carry her emotional scars.

Making the cover collage for the book was lots of fun and helped me to get used to images I have not always wanted to look at: the faces of those girls my sister and I were, emotionally buffeted by the storms of our family's problems, the young face of my soldier father... What I have learned is that creativity heals, that "story" become the vehicle for our own transformations--and so here is the book. I hope it speaks to you, the reader, and helps you to become closer to your own story.

Pat Schwartz