Two years ago, an old friend with
whom I hadn’t been in touch since high school, found me on Facebook and
contacted me. We first met when we were eleven years old and quickly became best
friends. I went to her family reunions, and she accompanied my parents and me on
our family vacations to Upstate New York. We saw each other every day, talked
on the phone every night, and were generally inseparable. Somehow we lost touch
after high school, and reconnecting after so many years, despite being a little
scary, was filled with the hopeful anticipation of renewed closeness. While thinking
about our “reconnection” this week, I realized that although there are hordes
of poems about romantic love, I haven’t seen
many poems about plain old friendship. An article on the Poets.org Website
refers to friendship poems as the
neglected cousins of love poems, and that certainly seems to be true although there
is a tradition of poets writing poems
to their poet friends or to poets whose work they admire (for example, the
exchange between Elizabeth Bishop
and Robert Lowell).
This week, in honor of my
childhood friend, and in honor of your
friends, let’s write friendship poems. The big caveat is to be very wary of
sentimentality (a.k.a. schmaltziness, sappiness, corniness, over-romanticizing)
– carefully distinguish between sentimentality and poetic sentiment – excessive sentiment is sentimentality
and very much a negative term in literary criticism. Keep in mind that movies,
children’s stories, and greeting card verses may be able to get away with
sentimentality, but a poem can’t. So … stay objective, watch out for overuse of
complimentary adjectives, and don’t “wax poetic.” Describe your friendship as
it is or was, approach your friendship from unexpected perspective, let your
poem take you somewhere you didn’t plan to go, and be sure to observe the old
poetry “maxim” – show, don’t tell.
Examples:
Ideas for Writing:
1. Write a poem about a very special friend, old or new (and by the way, that friend may be furred or feathered),
2. Write a poem to a friend (you might try an ode for this one or perhaps a prose poem in letter format).
3. Write a poem to your BFF (that’s the current text/chat acronym for “Best Forever Friend”).
4. Write a poem about reconnecting with an old friend after many years. (How are your lives different? Can you reclaim the old closeness? What hasn’t changed? What has?)
5. Write a poem about an imaginary meeting with a friend you haven’t seen in years.
6. Write a poem about a friend who betrayed you.
7. Write an elegy to a friend who has passed.
8. Write a poem to a poet whose work you admire.
And just for fun (remember this friendship classic?) ...
