Over the years, I’ve used various versions of this prompt with my undergraduate students: a poem you would not show your father, your grandparents, your aunts, your high school English teacher. For young poets, the prompt urges them to think of themselves as adults—and, I hope, gives them permission to express themselves that way. Too often, the writing assignments they’ve been given in school reward playing it safe, ask them to present a sanitized version of the self that’s palatable to adults, to authority. This prompt frees them to be insolent, irreverent, transgressive. Yes, I say, you can swear in your poems if you want.
The prompt also offers a reminder that every speaker is a persona. We move through our lives by code-switching: The way we talk to our friends at a party is not the way we talk to our professors, our parents, our great-uncle at the family reunion. When you sit down to write a poem, especially one being written in the context of a class, it can be tempting to choose the presentable, respectable, safe, people-pleasing version of yourself as the voice of the poem. This prompt says you don’t have to choose that one.
At the core of the very best poems is a depth of investment on the part of the writer, a kind of vulnerability, an openness to discovery. But as a teacher of young people, I can’t ask them for that. They’re not all ready to dig so deeply into their own psyche, and some of them have very good reasons to avoid writing about their trauma. I’m not their therapist or their parent. If they write long enough and seriously enough, they likely will get to that when it’s time. It’s their writing life, not mine; it’s their mental health they need to guard. So I try to give prompts that nibble around the edges of this rawness—that offer opportunities for those who want them, but to which others can respond from a safer distance.
Of course, the prompt isn’t only for young poets. All of these things I’ve just talked about—protecting oneself on the page, choosing safely from among one’s many personae, not merely writing a poem one knows will garner praise—I slide toward those tendencies myself, all the time. This prompt is a reminder for me as well.
Perhaps the best poem that came from this prompt was written by a student whose mother had died when she was younger; she wrote a poem that she would not show her mother but also could not show her had she wanted to. It was complex and beautiful. The best possible result from a prompt—any prompt—is a poem the prompt’s creator could not have seen coming.
Amorak Huey is the author of four books of poems, including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Cofounder with Han VanderHart of the small poetry press River River Books, Huey teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is coauthor with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024).