One of my favorite opening lines in poetry is from Christopher Buckley's "Old News: Poem on a Birthday," which begins, "When it came down to it, I loved the '50s." The first six words indicate that the speaker is making a compromise, and given our tangled memory of the 1950s -- Happy Days and Marilyn Monroe juxtaposed with the Little Rock Nine and sexual repression -- we might expect the poem to be about culture and politics. Instead, it's about childhood. The poet drops a few historical references (Frank Sinatra, Ebbets Field) but they serve only as a backdrop for an affectionate self-portrait: a remembrance of preadolescent hope and confusion, a ramble of slow days and clung-to friends and vaguely expanding consciousness (the poem tracks the author as a toddler, feeling like his grandfather would never die, and also as an older boy, imagining that he had a cosmic reward coming just for "breathing in style" among his peers). All the expected agonies of early life are done away with in those first six words, leaving only the enchantments: "the spectacular black and white winter nights," the allure of the pink neon call letters of the radio station, angels imagined over parking lots.

Buckley had the 1950s. My childhood decade was the '80s, and, when it came down to it, I loved them too. Like his, my recollections are a haphazard mix of personal and cultural; the ecstasy of Friday-night sleepovers and the comforting simplicity of Saturday-morning TV, friendships solidified over bright electronic loops of Atari music. We played with G.I. Joe and Rambo toys and felt like they symbolized the people who protected us. Our favorite pop singers, from Michael Jackson to Cyndi Lauper, seemed weird but harmless -- eccentric aunts and uncles rather than troubling strangers. For preteens now, it's Minecraft instead of Atari, Taylor Swift instead of Jackson or Lauper. The scenery changes from one generation to another. The rites of passage, more or less, stay the same.

I seem to be reaching for childhood poems these days. Maybe it's because I'm a parent. The Journal of Radical Wonder has given me the extraordinary gift of a weekly poetry feature, and each of the last two weeks, I submitted a piece about a young character. The protagonist of "The Girl Concentrates" is being good, building a model space shuttle at her family's urging after a real one exploded on television. In "Boy at the Backyard Pond," the title character is being bad, at least kind of -- almost breaking the family's goldfish bowl with his recklessness, then testing his destructive powers with a rock in the backyard. We all have moments as children when we act as model citizens or savages. I would guess that most of our favorite memories are of times when we act as neither. That fertile ground in between, where we rub out the guidelines but leave enough of a trace to follow them if we need to, is where I think the essence of childhood really lies.

This is the side of us that forms cliques but not gangs, that passes notes but not threats, that stays up late telling scary stories but keeps them PG-13-rated. It's in that in-between world that we often begin shaping our personalities, even if they're less revolutionary than we imagine. I am thinking now of a couple of recent movies about filmmakers under 18: J.J. Abrams' Super 8 and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans, In both films, the lead characters empower themselves by creating their own makeshift production companies: assigning parts, writing scripts, coming up with the best special effects their limited funds can buy. All of them dream of making it one day in Hollywood, where they will require tough skins and keen business acumen to survive. That's what childhood is often about, at least during the unsupervised hours: We shut out the adult world so that, in our own crude way, we can reenact it.

Sometimes, the adults remember. This week's poem in the Journal is "The Glass" -- another entry from The First Thing Mastered, which contains "Boy at the Backyard Pond" and other poems about the formative years of life. In this one, the narrator recalls the mysterious grownup that pushed a wine glass through the door to his friends during house parties on the Fourth of July, and the mixture of exhilaration (at skirting the rules) and revulsion (at the actual taste of wine) that he felt as a result. "The Glass" is written in first person, but it's entirely made up. Only the emotions in it are true. Growing up, most of us have those tingling encounters with things that we're not supposed to have: the R-rated movie that we glimpse a few seconds of, the power tool that we touch just for a second, the whispered comment that we overhear from an older person's room. Eventually, we reach an age when all those forbidden things are at our disposal. Our parents no longer keep us in line, but the police and IRS do. By then, we've learned to be good.

Last week, the Journal of Radical Wonder launched a video series for writers on how to find inspiration. John Brantingham, the magazine's co-editor, began the series by urging participants to start in their own backyards and look for signs of life that they hadn't noticed before. "Life is wonder," he said, "and if you look at it the right way, life is also joy."

Words have connotations, and "wonder" -- which a typical dictionary defines as a sense of surprise and astonishment, mingled with curiosity -- often gets associated with joy and innocence. S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders uses the rapturous beauty of sunsets as a symbol for wonder, even implying, in its final passages, that if the story's hardened gang members took more time to gaze at the changing colors before dusk, they would be less inclined to vent their aggression on the streets. (The novel, which came out in 1967, may be more a child of the Summer of Love than we often give it credit for.) Brantingham, in his video, cites Allen Ginsberg's poem "Sunflower Sutra," in which the author encounters a sunflower amid the grime of San Francisco and spins it into a metaphor for our own desecrated purity: "We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside..."

So, wonder starts with looking. To be surprised or astonished about something, we first have to study it closely -- something our constant attention to duties (and iPhones) can easily thwart. Like Ponyboy, we can find that doing so puts us in a more vulnerable and receptive state. We only comprehend the natural world up to a point. Submitting to the aesthetic rush of a sunset or sunflower reminds us that we are merely explorers in the world, not its creators. Perhaps a mindset of this kind can dissuade us from a rumble with the Socs or an overdependence on locomotives. I think, though, of a line from Ginsberg's greatest inspiration, Walt Whitman, who wrote in "Song of Myself": "I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also." Even in a state of wonder, we are simply engaging in heightened awareness of the world around us. What we do with that awareness depends on our personal ratio of goodness and wickedness.

Watching Brantingham's video, I began sorting through my own work to see if I had a poem about the concept that he described: perusing one's own backyard for truth or enlightenment. The one I finally came upon was "Boy at the Backyard Pond," and it goes a way toward proving Whitman's insight. The poem, which came out ten years ago in the book The First Thing Mastered, is about wonder but not joy, alertness but not innocence. The poem's title character finds himself at the titular location, musing about the clarity of his reflection in the water but also his power to dash it with a stone. Earlier, the boy terrified his family members by hoisting a goldfish bowl over the floor (and apparently threatening to drop it), and he is mesmerized by his ability to destroy things if he pleases.

Does that make him a bad kid? I don't know. I never hear anyone refer to someone as a "bad kid." We have a tendency to view children as basically good and earnest, and if they act otherwise, we often blame it on circumstance: tough times at home, learning disabilities, growing pains, etc. Mostly, we reserve our harsh judgments for those who are older and know better. Perhaps the boy in the poem has a side of him that would protect the goldfish, that would rather study his reflection than stone it. All of us are ruled by opposing forces. In any case, "Boy at the Backyard Pond" ends in progress -- not just in terms of the character's development, but in terms of the rock that he hurls at the water. Of course, it will break the surface and make a splash. Of course, that disruption will be followed by silence and stillness. Is there a point in action if the world erases it? The boy has time to ponder that question. It may not be wonder in the innocent sense, but at least he is exploring his own backyard.

My latest poem in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "The Girl Concentrates," a new piece from my manuscript in progress. Three other pieces from the manuscript -- "The Birdwoman Stirs by da Vinci's House," "Openings," and "The Pioneers" -- appeared recently on the site as well. Thanks, as always, to the editors for their support.

As I noted in a recent blog, I have less to say about new poems than I do about old ones; in the grand tradition of Andy Warhol, I prefer to keep quiet and let the art speak for itself. So I will use the rest of this entry to point out some other fine pieces that appeared in Radical Wonder this week:

1. Jane O'Shields' "The Obsidian Mare" is a rhyming poem that uses color strikingly -- the words "black" and "obsidian" feature prominently throughout, and the poet uses them to create an image not of darkness but actually of light. Obsidian black was the light she shone ... the bare-backed, shining, obsidian mare ... blackness creates its own glow, just as whiteness can create its own shadow, I suppose. At the end of the poem, we have a blackbird as well, "carrying twigs, with brittle tips flaming." There is definitely a yin and yang at work in this poem.

2. John Yamrus' essay "ten" is another spontaneous, insightful piece by a writer who often eschews capitals and composes in a style that hearkens back to the days when authors hammered their work on typewriters: rough, unpolished, but permanently etched on the page. Truman Capote famously sniped about John Kerouac's work, "This isn't writing, it's typing," but typing is merely its own form of writing. In "ten" (yes, the title is lowercase too), Yamrus muses about his "haphazard" approach to writing poetry and the difference between wanting to be a writer and doing the actual work of it. In Yamrus' bio at the bottom, he notes that a book of his selected poems was just released in Albania. That's some indication of having done the work.

3. Lastly, John Brantingham, the co-editor of the magazine, announced the other day that he'll begin posting a series of video prompts that encourage writers to rediscover a sense of joy and wonder. John wrote "The Green of Sunset," one of my favorite poems about joy and wonder, so I would imagine that he'll have some keen insights for us. You can see his introductory video here and the first prompt here.

A few days after 9/11, I was walking around the campus at UCI -- my residence at the time -- when a man approached me and invited me to his apartment. I don't have a clear recollection of what he looked like, but that really proves the point; during those days after the terror attack momentarily grouped us all together as "Americans," our standards for who belonged to our group become suddenly lax. The man wanted me to join the prayer circle that he was having at his apartment. I said yes, almost reflexively. Like the host himself, the evening that followed has grown vague in my memory; as I recall, we sat on the living room carpet, listened to a few verses from the Bible or I Ching or whatever, and then said goodnight. I doubt that many of the people there had met before or saw each other again. For that moment, before our cynical instincts kicked in again, we were united as part of an unassailable community. In short, we were neighbors.

We have an odd relationship with the word "neighborhood." Dictionary.com defines it as both a geographical place ("a district or locality, often with reference to its character or inhabitants") and a human demographic ("a number of persons living near one another or in a particular locality"). Certainly, Fred Rogers put a positive enough spin on it. I would guess, though, that if we catalogued every time we used the word in conversation, the majority of uses would have a tone of wariness. That school isn't in the best neighborhood. I'm not sure about that neighborhood. It's amazing that he made it out of that neighborhood. Even when we refer to something as a "nice neighborhood," there's often an undertone of relief; we're probably not commenting on the beauty of the architecture or the friendliness of the HOA so much as the statistical unlikeliness that we'll be burglarized or mugged. As I write this, I'm sitting in the study at my home in Calabasas, in a cluster of streets that are tree-lined, sunny, and often populated by dog-walkers and kids heading to the park. Nearly every house has a sign in front declaring a home security system. Those alarms aren't there to thwart Osama bin Laden.

Unless we live out in the wild, we live in neighborhoods. That means living with a lot of people around us. We know very few of those people. No doubt you can rattle off at least the first names of the people who live in the houses on either side of you. How about two doors down? You might be struggling. Who occupies the home with the backyard behind yours, the people (or person) with whom you literally share a fence? Give me a map of my neighborhood, and I can grab a highlighter and dot a handful of houses whose inhabitants I know. The other addresses may harbor Taylor Swift or Elon Musk; I have no idea. Of course, we see people out and about as well, and we often know them by a particular habit or appearance: the woman who walks the corgi, the man who works on his front porch, the girl with the yellow bicycle. They are our neighbors, and as nice as they may look, we wouldn't trust our children alone with many of them. We don't know who they are. With the right boundaries in place, we can smile and wave.

My featured poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "Neighborhood," another piece that appeared 10 years ago in the book The First Thing Mastered. That book moves chronologically through the first three decades or so of life, and "Neighborhood" crops up in the section about late childhood/early adolescence. It's a portrait of a moment when a neighborhood feels like a mystical place: summer day, cool drinks on the table, the gardener (maybe he's Juan or Diego or Ramon, with any kind of past or closeted secrets -- in any case, we know him as "the gardener") stopping by to ask for donations and everyone in the mood to indulge. The key line, stressed in the poem twice, is "before the locks go on." We wish the gardener well and hope that he raises enough money for his soccer field. When we turn the locks, he'll be among those we keep out.