We all have our versions of Proust’s madeleine, some object whose scent or sound or tactile sensation will stir remembrances of things past. The smell of burning leaves, say, or the fine dust from a pencil sharpener. The creak of a playground swing, the ticking of a pocket watch. The worn, pliant leather of a baseball mitt. Such tokens and talismans prompt many of our poems, and perhaps strike us most forcefully when they’re come upon suddenly, out-of-mind for years.

Those of us who’ve made lives from reading and writing can often point to a book that raises such memories. This year marks the birthday of a little volume that, now that I look back, probably had more influence on my life than many another I might’ve named, had I not come across a copy last fall in a second-hand bookstore. There it was on a shelf, the book that changed my life way back in the 60’s. Not that I knew it then.

In fact I don’t remember, exactly, which year it was of junior high school (seventh grade? eighth?) when we were handed a slim paperback from Scholastic Book Services entitled Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle… and Other Modern Verse. I don’t recall our teacher, either. But I do remember how different this book was. There were no numbered questions after each poem, no information about the poets. There were black and white photographs every few pages, but not of the authors; these pics were arresting works of art themselves, often but not in every case offering a kind of photographic corollary to the poem on the facing page, like the image of those vapor trails across from John Updike’s “Sonic Boom.”

Somehow, even though I’d mention Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle now and then in conversation (usually among fellow poets), I tended to regard it the way I did other youthful reading, The Hardy Boys or Jules Verne or those abridged classics many of us can credit with encouraging an early mania for the written word but which we also tend to relegate to a kind of bibliographic juvenilia, if not nostalgia.

Reading Reflections on a Gift after all these years, I am gobsmacked by the sophistication of the selections in its 143 pages, how daring the choices of its editors (Stephen Dunning, Edward Lueders, and Hugh Smith) and their refusal to patronize readers barely into their teens. How different from all the maudlin Longfellow and lurid Poe we’d been slogging through.

What was so different about it?

Subject matter, for one thing. What grabbed me first were probably titles like “Foul Shot” and “The Base Stealer,” my adolescent imagination turned on by how Edwin Hoey and Robert Francis had captured such fine points of their respective sports. I loved Hoey’s description of the basketball player’s pre-shot ritual at the free-throw line before he “calms” the ball with his fingertips, and then, “through a stretching of stillness / Nudges it upward.” Likewise, Francis seemed to me to get exactly right the base-stealer’s poise, “pulled / Both ways taut like a tightrope walker.” It would be a few years before I noticed the artfulness of the line breaks in either poem; I was taken by the rightness of the descriptions, emotionally and athletically. These were images and feelings recognizable to any of us young gym rats and sandlot hounds.

The Updike poem mentioned above spoke to my own experience, sonic booms frequent but nonetheless ever-startling throughout a childhood of living on or near Air Force bases. I’m not sure we’d read Yeats or Shelley by then, but in any case swans and skylarks wouldn’t have had the same appeal as Sy Kahn’s giraffe (“Stilted…Finger painted,” with ears “like leaves…brushing the clouds”) or Theodore Roethke’s bat, that mouse with wings and “a human face.” It’s not hard to hear echoes, years later, in my poems about lions at the zoo (“a caging of African sun, / the Serengeti still in their skin”) or the humble mole (“Dirt-diver. Ground-sweller. / Swimmer through soil and dark”). An old story goes that it is never the sight of animals that inspires the novice artist but rather the depictions of those animals in art. Something of that sort must have lingered in me. I can see how these poems and others granted permission, if time-released and subconscious, to write about the ordinary features of our lives. William Jay Smith’s “The Toaster,” meet my poem about a spoon! Gerald Raftery’s apartment house and Burton Raffel’s construction site? Here are used car lots and motels from my poems. Before this fifty-cent paperback came along, the poets I knew had been ultra-serious, and mostly long-dead. I didn’t realize poets could know this stuff.

Striking as well was the book’s overall attitude toward poetry itself. Naoshi Koriyama’s “Unfolding Bud,” the opening poem, makes the case for enjoyment over analysis:

One is amazed
By a water-lily bud
Unfolding with each passing day,
Taking on a richer color
And new dimensions.

One is not amazed,
At first glance,
By a poem,
Which is as tight-closed
As a tiny bud.

Yet one is surprised
To see the poem
Gradually unfolding,
Revealing its rich inner self,
As one reads it
Again
And over again.

I realize now how central to my view of poetry this is. There’s also the phenomenon described by Bariss Mills in “Gone Forever”:

Halfway through shaving, it came—
the word for a poem.
I should have scribbled it
on the mirror with a soapy finger,
or shouted it to my wife in the kitchen,
or muttered it to myself till it ran
in my head like a tune.

Alas, this time the word slips away forever—down the drain!—as if to warn all of us poets-to-be of such hazards to come.

These poems had discernible attitudes about things. Arthur Guiterman’s “Ancient History” begins a section of poems delightfully irreverent in a Shel Silverstein sort of way. (Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic would come along in the 70’s.) There was irreverence, too, in form; Cummings was here, plus Ferlinghetti and William Carlos Williams, but also May Swenson and Babette Deutsch, poets who could write the freest of free verse and who slyly satirized traditional forms even as they employed them. And there was Beatrice Janosco’s “The Garden Hose”:

In the gray evening
I see a long green serpent
With its tail in the dahlias.

It lies in loops across the grass
And drinks softly at the faucet.

I can hear it swallow.

Clever, quirky, with a refreshing spookiness or mystery—so many of these poems seemed to shake off restrictions and expectations in a way we could appreciate. These poets, apparently, really did know this stuff.

It helped that Carl Sandburg shared our classroom bafflement—“Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head”—as well as our appreciation of absurdity: “Arithmetic tells you how many you lose or win if you know how many you had before you lost or won.” Surely the long, long lines here were part of the fun being poked. The poems we’d read in school had always been problems to solve; here were poems that gently lampooned such puzzles in favor of mystery. Even then we could see and hear and feel the difference. Good, too, that even the nature poems shied away from Wordsworthian daffodils, tending instead toward darker themes, as in Kahn’s “Boy with Frogs,” where the budding scientist

is content
To study them a while,
With their delicate legs
Pressed against the glass,
The futile leaps to freedom
And their frantic eyes.

It’s a game for a God
Of course.

I have to wonder, now, if there was something in the air—or behind the glass—back then, Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, with its depiction of frogs as “great slime kings,” appearing the same year as Reflections. I would go on to write a doctoral dissertation (among other things) about Heaney’s work. I wonder, too, if these reflections on things mathematical and scientific didn’t instill in me a similar interest, poetically anyway. One of my earliest efforts was “Greater Than, Less Than”:

When two sides won’t agree,
we draw a further wedge between

them, a penciled arrowhead aimed
always at some lesser value.

We’ve earned the right
and left, the back and forth

of these equations, learned
to figure each advantage.

No more counting on our fingers,
no answers merely guessed at.

Beyond our early sums,
all equal signs are suspect.

Later, I’d write about the Doppler effect, Euclidean geometry, the infinity symbol (“a little colorless butterfly,” a race track, a rubber band), the centrifugal force of a spinning Hula Hoop, and enough comets, stars, and eclipses to fill a planetarium. Perhaps that ordinary jar of watermelon pickle in the collection’s title poem might explain my affinity for Wallace Stevens’s famous anecdote, which likely led to my own, even earthier “jar” poem. It also might have had something to do with my eventually teaching for forty years in Tennessee. What else might this little volume from Scholastic Books have been  responsible for? Finding it again was like coming upon a map I drew in childhood and discovering that I’ve been following it ever since.

How else to explain the shock of recognition in Judson Jerome’s “Deer Hunt,” the speaker confessing that he “flinched at every lonely rifle crack,” felt like “retching,” but nonetheless gripped “once again the monstrous gun— / since I, to be a man, had taken one”? Growing up in a culture of hunters, some of us didn’t think we could voice such sentiments. Likewise, Dan Roth’s “War” suggested that, if Vietnam-era headlines left us questioning the world of our elders, we weren’t alone:

Dawn came slowly,
almost not at all.
The sun crept over the hill
cautiously
fearful of being hit
by mortar fire.

I’m still fond of the payoff in that last line, the commando-crawl of the poem’s title toward the only overt reference to battle at the end.

And surely there were those among us who connected with “Too Blue,” in which Langston Hughes’ speaker “ain’t got / Neither bullet nor gun” and feels too disheartened “to look for one.” Perhaps Dorothy Parker, in “Resume,” provided a harsh tonic for fending off such bleakness, “You might as well live” almost a mantra for us in the years to come as we encountered Beckett, Camus, and the like.

More hopeful, maybe, was William Stafford’s “Fifteen.” Chafing under the same stasis his speaker feels, that sense of going nowhere fast, we are shown the possibility of breaking free internally, psychically, ethically. We might not have been fifteen yet, but we could see how a single decision enables a quantum leap in maturity.

Indeed, it’s possible at this remove to frame the reading of this book itself as one of those leaps, at least for me. It’s not that every poem here is a masterpiece. Some poems qualify as light verse, others merely lightweight in theme or method. But even the lighter poems, by John Ciardi or William Jay Smith or Eve Merriam or others, are just plain fun. And that was another epiphany.

The book’s final, title poem, John Tobias’s “Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity,” combines many of the features I see in retrospect as so inspiring to young readers. Keats’s Grecian urn and Stevens’ hilltop jar set aside, Tobias begins more plainly by idealizing a childhood we had only recently outgrown (and secretly still treasured), those summers when “unicorns were still possible” and the “purpose of knees / Was to be skinned.” But the poem grows up a bit, too, with stolen cigarette butts and a watermelon’s “black bullet seeds…spit out in rapid fire.” The speaker admits that such summers “may never have been at all,” merely images seen through rose-colored (let’s say melon-colored) glasses. The bites of watermelon “are fewer now,” he says, and swallowed “reluctantly.” It’s only in a jar put up by Felicity that

The summer which maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue:
Unicorns become possible again.

Coda to the poems here, or a vessel for their collective themes and impulses, this gift from the aptly named Felicity is a metaphor for the imagination itself, then and now. It is a testament to a poem as an experience in language, poetry not only a capturing of experience by words but also an experience of words, a language experience. We taste it like watermelon.

This collection was not some sort of poetic chicken soup for the youthful soul, still less a book of “virtues” cynically aiming at ethical complacency. This was a shock to both the reader’s and the educational system. The book offered poems as playful in form as they were serious of purpose. It showed poetry as a beginning, the opening rather than closing words on the matter at hand.  It wasn’t a textbook. It wasn’t a manual.

It was a gift.

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Emeritus Professor of English and former Associate Academic Dean at Bethel University, James Scruton is the author of two full collections of poetry and five chapbooks, including the award-winning Galileo’s House (Finishing Line Press) and Exotics and Accidentals (Grayson Books). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and many other publications.