When I was writing monthly poetry writing columns for Writer’s Digest Magazine, I created strategies for writing poetry that utilized as a jumping off place the topical thoughts our culture promotes each month.  I wanted to help those who wanted to write poetry liberate themselves from the influence of the advertising buzz and Hallmark card lingo that surround them.  When I took on Father’s Day, I learned the history of the holiday. In May, 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, WA got the idea for Father’s Day while listening to a Mother’s Day sermon.  Her father had raised her after the death of her mother.  Because she believed him to be a loving and selfless man, she wanted to create a day for celebrating fathers.  She chose June as the celebration month because her father’s birthday was that month and in June, 1910 held the first Father’s Day celebration in Spokane.  The third Sunday in June officially became Father’s Day in the United States in 1922.

I like knowing that the root of Father’s Day is one person who wanted to thank her father.  Fathers are their daughter’s first loves and for sons, the eternal models of being right in the world.  Both gods and human beings, they inspire us and disappoint.  They empower us and seem sometimes to take that power away.  Sometimes we leave our fathers and become prodigal.  Sometimes we return with something humble in our hearts.  In our lives, we both prove our fathers right and prove them wrong.

In keeping with my desire to facilitate poetry writing that praises individuality amidst the generalities our culture perpetrates, I devised two exercises for writing poetry about fathers that avoids clichés and easy sentimentality.  While some of us think we can write only about difficult moments and others of us think only the brighter moments inform our poems, the late poet William Matthews believed we all have two childhoods, a happy one and an unhappy one.  We can write, he said, from both.

There are many famous poems for and about fathers, poems about longing for them not to leave and poems about turning away from them.  You may know the villanelle by Dylan Thomas’ “Don’t Go Gentle Into that Dark Night,” , in which he rails against his father’s death or Sylvia Plath’s famous, “Daddy,” in which she exorcises her father’s dark, authoritarian spirit from her life.  Whether you believe times with your dad were difficult or easy, the two strategies I devised offer you a way to find lessons in your relationship with him.

To Praise

What, I thought, would happen, if I wrote a litany of memories that were unpraiseworthy about my father, not memories that satirized him but ones that one would usually not sing about in a Father’s Day card.  I would say that I praised him for these things, nonetheless.

First, I jotted down images and events I associated with my father that my mother, my sister and I had made fun of or had disliked. I remembered that when I was a young girl, he had smoked, that he kept cat skulls on his shelves that everyone thought were morbid and weird.  I remembered that he never trusted that my sister and I would take care of our things.  I remembered how my mother talked for years about how he’d abandoned her one morning to deal alone with a backed up toilet.  I remembered his friends making fun of him for the grass seed he planted in a flowerpot. I wrote a litany repeating, “I praise him for….”using the more interesting of these images. As I wrote, I remembered more.   Next, I went back to my list and inserted phrases and sentences that spoke to a lesson I might have learned from each of the behaviors I had remembered. I thought about an order for the images and lessons that I thought would make the poem build in strength. When I was done, I used a title to indicate that my memories could be seen differently than the way the family had traditionally seen them:

 After you read my exercise result, try your hand at using these steps for writing a litany in praise of your father or anyone else important in your life.

Some Things He May Not Know He Taught Me

— For my father

I praise him for the nicotine stain on his middle finger, his writing
callous highlighted like yellow over text I’d come to know:
“Writing makes a bump others find ugly.”

I praise him for displaying two varnished skulls from cats
he’d dissected in biology, the way he bolted those skulls to mahogany
and kept them on his shelves, a trophy for attending college against all odds.

I praise him for the diligence with which he wrote a jingle
night after night at our kitchen table trying to win prizes from the supermarket
opening in town.  I praise him for the special care he took with the 78 rpm
Pinocchio album which was his prize, forbidding my sister or me touch it
when he was not around.  I praise the way he cherished what he worked so hard for.

I praise him for the clay pot he planted with grass seed scooped from the ground
when gardeners sowed a lawn each spring between the buildings of our court.
I praise the tan dry husks for the new green sprouts he cut with scissors
every Saturday, showing us how chores get done.

I praise him for the day when I was four and watched him shave
until the plumbing backed up and with an inch or more of sewer water
underfoot, he lifted me from the room and left for work, waking
my mother in a hurry.  She argued it wasn’t fair to leave her
with the mess.  I praise him for that day he taught me
nothing unexpected need be fair.

I praise him for the hand he slammed against the steering wheel
our first time through the Lincoln Tunnel when a car rear-ended us
and pharmaceuticals for doctor calls that week clanked and smashed and oozed.
I praise him for the way he did not easily accept what wasn’t in his control,
and quick most times to anger, he let us know his burden and his soul.

I praise him for the way he stood before us in the mornings, smooth shaven,
dressed in suit and tie, handing us the cardboard from his laundered shirt.
“Do I look presentable?” he asked, brown attaché in hand.
I praise him for the way he thought we knew the word,
for the 8 1/2 by 11 rectangle we colored to show him when he came home.

Doing this exercise, you will find out that evoking your father’s behavior can lead to honoring him, the relationship and yourself.  The specifics you remember about his behavior and words lead to truth, not easy sentimentality.

To Make A Word Snapshot

Another way to employ specific detail to come up with meaningful poems is to write what I call a snapshot poem.  In this kind of poem, the writer freezes a moment inside of an event as a photo does.  The poet uses images from the five senses to put the moment on the page and insight comes through the images selected.  A favorite snapshot poem of mine is Jim Mitsui’s poem “Allowance.” (Click here for information about the poet’s book.)  He announces in it that he is ten. He tells where his mother is sitting (“My mother sits in a black rocking chair…”) and what she is dreaming of (rice fields) and he tells where he is standing (“I stand in the kerosene light…”) and what he is doing–pulling grey hairs and earning a penny for each one he has pulled.  One thing you know by the end of the short poem is that each of the grey hairs represents distance from the beloved home and time. If you know more about James Mitsui, you know the action is taking place in an internment camp during WWII.

To adapt the snapshot strategy to a poem about my father and me, I thought about moments with my dad.  I thought about the days he bought a white football and tried teaching my sister and me to play.  I thought about the way he stayed in his car doing paper work before he came in from work and how I watched him from the window.  I thought about sitting in the back seat of the car when he taught my mother to parallel park between two bushel baskets amidst the colorful leaves of fall.  The moment that inspired me to write, though, was a memory from our family room on Sunday nights–my father would study cards with information about pharmaceuticals and prepare sales talks for the doctors he would call on.  Stating where we were (what I was sitting in) seemed like a good title.  Then, I gathered images from this moment, whether they were in the room with us or associated with what was going on in the room.  Next, I asked myself, “What does the activity (and the associated images) in this moment make me think about my father and our relationship?”  The answer to this question became the poem’s ending.

Here’s my stab at the snapshot poem:

Sitting in the Black and Gold Replica of an Early American Rocker

I see my father at his maple desk staring at index cards to memorize
the pharmaceutical sales pitches he’ll need that week to call on doctors.
His hair is closely cropped because it’s barbered every Saturday,
and his suit and tie hang neatly on the valet outside his closet.

When he gives me the cards he’s studied so I can quiz him,
I think he stumbles just to test my attention.

How much time before I know that he can make mistakes at all?

After I ended the poem, I realized that just as James Mitsui had captured the importance of his mother’s memories, I was capturing something from the time that I believed my father was infallible.  Although his handing me the cards could be seen as edifying because he trusted me to read well, it was also impossible for me to think my father made mistakes.  I think the poem evokes the presence he had in the family.

*****

I hope you enjoy the results of using these two poetry-writing templates. If you’d like to send your results in to me, I’d love to see them.  If something in these exercises sparks more poem making strategies for you, please let me know about that too!