The appeal of poetry about family: Poetry versus Greeting Card Verse

I remember long ago being told about the difference between poetry and greeting card verse. As a poet, you should strive to avoid greeting card verse type poems. As mature poets, that might seem like a rather juvenile bit of advice, maybe. However, I was thinking of this when I considered some poems that I wrote about or dedicated to family members – my father, or my grandparents. I was wondering, what appeal could these have for a general audience outside my family. At a recent poet reading (at St. Andrews College), Jeff Wyatt read a poem read a poem dedicated to his father. Probably no one in the audience, other than maybe 2 or 3 folks even met his father.

What does this have to do with the topic of greeting card verse? Well, in a greeting card, one might right something for a father that could be given to any father on Father’s Day, for example. Jeff’s poem and the poems that I’ve written to my father, these could not be applied to any father. Jeff’s father was a pilot, so I wonder if there was a connection there. Maybe someone listening to that poem, who had or has a father who is a pilot would connect because of that. There is something more though. I appreciated Jeff’s poem, yet my father wasn’t a pilot and I don’t know any pilots. I cannot really put into words what it was that allowed me to appreciate Jeff’s poem.

Now, let’s turn to my poems about family. My poems had to do with the dynamics of the unique relationship between my father and me, or between me and my father and my grandparents. I might have to reproduce the poems here to make my point, but maybe not. Maybe, though there are very unique aspects to the circumstances of our lives and our relationships – myself and my parents, grandparents, I think that perhaps there are universal themes here. Some themes that stand out in my poems are the ways in which a guy (I, myself) is the same or different than his father or grandparents and how that plays out in the relationship over time… What a family tries to leave behind for the next generation… how a guy learns to appreciate these things only later in life.

As a poet, we have to have faith that our listeners will be able to appreciate something within our poetry, even when it seems we are writing something that is so personal that it would have no appeal other than with our own family.