How to Write About Someone Dying Without Writing About Grief

Every contest pile has forty grief poems that say the same thing. A judge explains why the best death poems are never about grief, the three objects that carry the weight instead, and a two-column method for finding the detail that makes a loss poem land.

In a judging round of two hundred entries there will be thirty poems about a death. Most of them are competent. Most of them are also interchangeable, because they are all writing about the same thing: the grief. And grief, as a subject, is the one thing every reader already understands. A poem that tells me you were sad is telling me the one thing I already knew.

The poems that stay with me, the ones I carry into the next round and the next year, are never about the grief. They are about the chair nobody sits in now, or the way the house went quiet in a new register, or the specific Tuesday the world forgot to change. They are about the thing that carries the loss, not the loss itself.

Why grief-as-subject fails

Grief is universal, and universal subjects produce universal poems. When you write "I miss you" or "the house is empty," you are writing what every reader has already thought, in the language every reader has already used. The poem is true and the poem is flat, because it contains nothing the reader did not bring to the page.

A poem earns its keep by showing the reader something they have not thought yet. The grief is the ground; the poem is what grows on it.

The three carriers

In the poems that work, the grief lives in a specific physical or habitual detail. Three carriers do most of the work.

The object. A single thing that belonged to the person and now has no job. The teacup on the shelf that nobody reaches for. The reading glasses folded on the table. The coat still hanging by the door. The object is small, concrete, and it holds the whole absence. Readers fill it in.

The routine. A habitual action that keeps happening, by muscle memory, after the reason for it is gone. Making two cups of tea. Checking the door at ten. Saying a name to an empty room. The routine is the grief wearing the body it used to live in.

The change in the ordinary. The one ordinary thing that is different now, and only you can see it. The way the street looks when you turn the corner and expect to see the car. The sound of a particular silence. The change is invisible to everyone else, which is why it belongs to the poem.

Notice what these have in common: they are all specific, all small, and none of them say the word 'grief' or 'sad' or 'miss'. The emotion is the water; the carrier is the glass that holds it.

The two-column method

Here is the method I use when a death poem of my own will not move. Draw two columns on a page.

Left column. Write down ten physical details of the person's life. Not 'kind' or 'funny' or 'always there'. Physical. The nick in the table. The way they held a pen. The brand of the biscuits. The sound of their laugh arriving late to a joke. The exact thing only you would know.

Right column. Write down ten things that are different now. Not 'I am sad'. Concrete. The cup that is never used. The phone that does not ring at that hour. The seat at the table that faces a different wall.

The poem lives at the join. Pick one item from each column and put them in the same line. The grief appears without being named, because the reader does the naming for you.

A worked example

Here is the difference. Flat: I still miss you every day. True and dead. The carrier version: Your cup is still on the second shelf, and I still take down two. Nobody says 'miss'. The reader says it for you, and it lands harder because it is theirs.

Where it goes wrong

The trap is piling up carriers until the poem becomes a museum. One object does the work of ten. The second trap is reaching for the obvious detail, the empty chair, the folded hands, and the poem stays generic. The detail has to be yours, the one only you would notice, because that is the thing the reader has not already thought.

If you are working on a poem like this, the prompts library has a set on loss and memory that pairs with this method, and when it is ready the contest is the place to send it. The grief is real. Give it a cup to live in.

Keep reading

For the craft side, the death poems collection covers the deeper method. The elegy form is the page to read next, and the Unheard Voices is where the work goes when it is done.

By Writory Editorial, for Writory.

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