Word Garden Word List--The Prodigy

 Hello my little adding machines, and welcome to this week's Word Garden Word List poetry prompt! 

This time, our source is Amy Wallace's fascinating biography of William James Sidis, entitled The Prodigy. I read it way back in 1988 (I have kept a book log since late1987)and have never forgotten it. 

Amy Wallace

Never heard of Willam James Sidis? Well, back in 1910, his name was synonymous with the phrase "child prodigy." His IQ was estimated to be 50-100 points higher than Einstein's. His father was a pioneer in the field of abnormal psychology; he and his wife believed that they could create a genius in the cradle. They hung ABC blocks above his crib and within six months little Billy was speaking. At three, he was typing and had taught himself Latin! At five, he wrote a treatise on anatomy, and at six he spoke at least seven languages fluently. 

The youngster enrolled at Harvard at age eleven, stunned the nation with a lecture on four-dimensional bodies, and articles about him ran on the front pages of the nation's leading newspapers. Graduating at sixteen, he was desperate for privacy.

William had had enough, and staged a dramatic rebellion against his parents, academia, and the world's expectations. It began with jail and a scandalous trial. He then drifted from one menial job to another, concealing his genius but writing a number of books on various subjects using pseudonyms. One of these dealt with his favorite hobby--the collecting of streetcar transfers. 

Today, his name means one thing to a handful of educators--a burned out failure who died, ironically, of a cerebral hemorrhage.  But now, in an era of parents frantically trying to push their children into achievement at ever-earlier ages, William James Sidis's story is more relevant than ever. In his own way, Sidis's life was a success of living on his own terms, rather than everyone else's.

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of one's own. Then simply link up, visit others, and do the math, dahling. This prompt remains active through Saturday.

And now, your List:

books

cotton

cram

dishes

enormous

famous

fat

girls

hellish

instantly

legend

love letters

midnight

numbered

problems

rained

riot

sewing

Sunday

trance 

Ode to a Chrome Cradle

 

The Ford Rotunda burning down, 1962.

It was decided

by women who had lost their sons

that there should be no more Sundays

in Detroit.

It was decided

by girls with broken dishes for bones

that all sewing should be done with dope needles

and veinous thread.

It was traditional

for the underground tunnel to Canada

to be filled with shredded tires and bent hubcaps

from fatalities.

In Detroit, the mediums

predict things that have already happened,

going into trance states instantly upon hearing

old Motown. 

It was decided

that love letters be made mandatory

for bums and debutantes whose heads rot softly

like pumpkins.

It was considered good form

for fat golfers to dole out mulligan freeways

through Black Bottom but never the fresh greensward

of Oakland county.

It was decided

in the end, that all elms be destroyed by fungi

and burned every Christmas at Ford Rotunda, disappearing

in tandem, brightly.

_________

The Detroit riots 1967

For Word Garden Word List--The Prodigy

Music: The Shangri-La's Leader of the Pack

Process notes: I grew up in well-off Oakland county, just a bop down Woodward Avenue from Detroit. I still remember being taken to the Ford Rotunda at Christmas when I was a small child. There were live reindeer, and my brother always got a toy version of a concept car. It burned down in 1962. I was seven years old.

In 1967, the city exploded in a riot after the police raided an after-hours "blind pig" nightclub. After decades of being hassled by Detroit police, the people there had finally had enough and fought back. I stood on the corner of Woodward Avenue up in my safe white suburb and watched the smoke rise over Detroit. I'll never forget it, and things would never be the same again.