Bolton, W. F.

English

Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University

Bridgewater ReviewVolume 4 | Issue 2 Article 8Sep-1986Poetry: A Star's BiographyW. F. BoltonThis item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.Recommended CitationBolton, W. F. (1986). Poetry: A Star's Biography. Bridgewater Review, 4(2), 11.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol4/iss2/8A Star's Biography"This is not what I am ... "When life has narrowed down,One finds oneself becomeOnly what one's public will remember:A man, a woman, caught by the personaOf certain fame.Behind the image,The presentation, the facade;Behind the million words, the gesturesLearned to perfection, the studied calm. Of the hidden self,Lies the horror.Howard London teaches in the Depart-ment .of Sociology and Anthropology ofBridgewater State College. His researchand publications concern higher education,.. particularly the areas of student, faculty,and administrative cultures. ProfessorLondon has served as a consultant to theNational Institute of Education's Programon Educational Policy and Organization,as well as to the National Commission onExcellence in Education.w. F. Bolton"This is not what I am ... "Watching one's self float offLike a child's balloonWhen one day the child lets go.Smaller and smaller, against the sun,Black as the whitest birdIn the brightest' sky.other.It is difficult to say just how represen-tative these fifteen students are ofothers who are the first in their familiesto go to college. They certainly werenot selected by a "scientific" samplingprocess. Most in fact were volunteersresponding to ads placed in studentnewspapers, and a few were foundthrough word of mouth. Perhaps onlythe ones with the most pressing con-cerns decided to participate; thenagain, maybe the ones with the mostpressing concerns were too anxious toparticipate. The important point, how-ever, is not whether or not the inter-viewed students are somehow "repre-sentive," but that they inform or re-mind us that social achievement is notalways entirely pleasant. It is, as we allknow, a culturally valued and usuallyunquestioned goal; but when we focuson the negative side of upward move-ment we see that the same modernitythat creates the possibility of "oppor-tunity" also creates the potential forbiographical and social dislocation. Itis, I believe, something we ought toinvestigate about our society, ourselves(if we have experienced it), and ourstudents.differently, for middle class studentswith a college legacy in the family,higher education is mostly further so-cialization, additional steps along afamiliar path; for first generation stu-dents, however, it is a resocializationand a departure, and a sometimes jar-ring one at that. Mobility, after all,requires learning the ways of a differentsocial class: its styles of language (ac-cent and vocabulary, for example),dress, aesthetic tastes, conversationaltopics, preferences in media, the arts,and so on. (Indeed, the classical sociolo-gist Max Weber claimed that the differ-ences between social classes were mostconspicuous in the conduct of every-day life.)There were many examples of this inthe interviews. One student, for ex-ample, told of returning home forThanksgiving vacation wearing a tweedsports jacket with patches on the el-bows, only to be teased mercilessly byhis family. Another reported how sheexpressed her new, more liberal standson sex roles and race relations duringthe family breakfast conversation, pro-voking angry outbursts that seemeddirected more at her than at her posi-tions. Of course, tweed jackets andliberalism are by no means monopo-lized by the middle class, but in bothcases (and in others like them) theywere seized upon as symbols of a stu-dent's becoming different, of be-coming more "middle class." Thesesymbols, then, provided family mem-bers with an opportunity to expresstheir concerns about the consequencesof change, more specifically, about thepossibility of loss. It was as if someonesaid, "Look, we've all noticed that youappear different in some respects. Wemay be proud of you, but we still wantto know what this means to us asindividuals and as a family. Will westill recognize your voice, or are we leftonly with a fading echo?" The students,of course, had similar concerns, andsometimes purposefully behaved "dif-ferently" in order to test the familywaters. In either case, I believe whatfamilies were really expressing, in anindirect, disguised and sometimescounterproductive fashion, was a senseof "endangered love," and a concernabout whether family members mightbe able to find new ways ofloving each11

Poetry: A Star\u27s Biography

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Poetry: A Star\u27s Biography

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