Poetry about life | Sylvia Plath .

When writing poetry about life, it’s tempting to attempt a poem on big, life-changing events.  But many times, the most uniquely touching poems are the ones that explore small, tender moments of life.

Sylvia Plath’s “You’re,” for example, is a lovely poem reflecting a mother observing her child.  This is an example of how poetry about life can surprise and delight us.  Plath opens with an unforgettable image, the title “You’re” leading to:

“Clownlike, happiest on your hands,   

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,   

Gilled like a fish.”

Perhaps poetry about life is so wonderful because these poems seem the most effortless.  But admittedly, this effortlessness can be a struggle to create.  How to appropriately capture that sweet happiness of watching your baby crawl without sounding trite, or like a Hallmark card?

In “You’re,” Plath played to her strengths, piling up very original (Plathian, if you will) descriptive imagery and similes—(“gilled like fish,” “mute as a turnip,” “jumpy as a Mexican bean.”) to a very Plathian rhythm, which you can see in more famous Plath poems such as “Daddy.” 

Imitation is a great exercise, a way to challenge and flex your writing muscles, but in writing poetry on life, it tends to pay off to be true to your voice.  One of the reasons why “You’re” is so beautiful, because as readers, we can feel Plath throughout the poem, but the emotion is joyful and celebratory.

Not all of us are fortunate enough to have such an identifiable voice as Plath’s, and of course personal voice is something that is constantly being worked and discovered.  To counter the tendency to become too philosophical or heady when writing, focusing on an image, a descriptive moment, is a way to access emotion without having to explicitly state it. 

Again, Plath does this in her opener, immediately recalling a joyful, specific memory of childish play, and then from there moves onto explore the more complicated emotions of being a mother, of having a child. 

The emotional power of a poem often lies in the expansiveness of a moment, which the poet translates into lines.  “You’re” is a loving and even silly poem.  But looking closer at the words and images that Plath chooses, we find a bit of that maternal fear and uncertainty that comes with having a child, seen in the line “[v]ague as fog and looked for like mail,” or the eeriness of her comparison to “[a] creel of eels, all ripples.”

Meanwhile, if you’re stuck in a rut and finding it hard to be inspired to write poetry about life, I find actively being in the world is a great source of inspiration.  Living in New York City, I love the moments that come about when eavesdropping on the subway, what the conversations between two middle-school girls can trigger in my mind, or watching a father interacting with his toddler daughter on a playground.  There are lovely moments all around, ready for us to turn them into poetry about life.

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