Following the guidelines of ONE of the following, write a parent/grandparent/relative poem:

1) Write a poem about a family member.  Suggestions: Describe them through something they do, relate a "telling" anecdote, observe a photograph of them, focus on some specific detail—how carefully your grandfather baits fish hooks or your grandmother slowly and quietly sneaks up on the chicken before twisting its neck for the Sunday stew.

2) Write a poem about a family member meeting a famous person.   For example: The night Aunt Dottie caught Elvis's handkerchief when he tossed it from the stage of The Sands in Vegas; the day Dad shook hands with Ike in France; the time Mom spilled coffee on Elizabeth Taylor and the other waitresses snickered.  In most cases, our loved ones'
encounters with the famous or powerful tend to be fleeting and bittersweet, however memorable they may later seem—and it's this aspect of the encounter that helps us to envision our family members in contexts that avoid easy sentimental gestures.  These are situations in which, in a small way, the forces of public history and private history collide, and these meetings help us to see our loved ones as individuals, not as types.

Guidelines for this exercise: (1) the encounter can be real or imaginary, but should at least be plausible—no meeting between Cousin Ed and Genghis Khan; (2) the family member, not the famous person, should be the protagonist of the poem, and it is her or his consciousness that the poem should try to enter and understand; (3) the writer of the poem should be an effaced presence, understanding the inner workings of the family member's mind but seeing the family member as a character referred to in the third person ("my father" and not "Dad," in other words) (4) the famous person can be anyone famous; (5) since the exercise tends to demand a fairly complex profile or portrait of the family member in question, it is best suited to longer poems—at least thirty lines.

See Stanley Plumly's "For Esther," Lynda Hull's "1933," Paul Muldoon's "Cuba," or Carolyn Kizer's "Twelve O'Clock" as models for this assignment.

3) (From Rita Dove)—"Write a poem about your mother's kitchen.  (It helps if you actually draw the kitchen first, with crayons!) Put the oven in it, and also something green, and something dead.  You are not in this poem, but some female relation—aunt, sister, close friend, neighbor—must walk into the kitchen during the course of the poem."       

OR

An offshoot from Rita's "Your Mother's Kitchen" is Write a poem about Your Father's (choose one) workshop, garage, dresser bureau, desk. Again, you’re not in the poem and a male must walk in.      

Whether you choose to write about the items on your father's bureau or the grease tracks on the yellow cabinets in your mother's kitchen, the poem should tell the reader about the individual parent.  Be careful that your parents don't emerge as stick figures no more complex than Ward and June Cleaver—Good Mommy, Dutiful Daddy, Granny-in-the-Kitchen-Baking-Pie.

4) Choose a family photo and use that as a jumping off point, describing the photo and anything relevant that happened before or after it was taken and main points of family history that are important to the people in the photo.

This exercise was taken from course materials prepared by Judy Jordan,
Southern Illinois University