Writing Wedding Poems: So Your Cousin Asked You
Someone found out you write and now there is a wedding in June. The interview method, the cliches to refuse, a worked example, and the awkward question of payment.
The message always arrives the same way. 'Hey!! So you write poems right? We're getting married in June and it would mean SO much...' And there it sits on your phone, flattering and terrifying, because writing wedding poems on request is the strangest commission in all of poetry: an audience of two hundred, a deadline that cannot move, a subject you half know, and zero tolerance for your usual tricks. I have written six of these for family and friends, refused two, and judged hundreds of love poems every year, so let me save you the mistakes I made with the first one, which my cousin still owns, framed, to my ongoing embarrassment.
Why Writing Wedding Poems Defeats Good Poets
Here is the trap. Your instincts as a poet, compression, strangeness, ambiguity, the earned dark note, are precisely the instincts a wedding cannot use. That gorgeous unresolved ending you love? A room in formalwear will hear it as doubt about the marriage. The startling image? Uncle Dev will lean over and ask what the octopus meant. Wedding poems are heard once, aloud, by people holding champagne, most of whom have not read a poem since school. You are not writing literature. You are writing a toast with better bones.
And yet the opposite failure is worse: surrendering to the greeting card. Two hearts, one soul, a journey beginning, love like the ocean. I score love poems every single month, and the ones built from that kit score lowest on creativity of anything I read, because they could be about any two humans who ever met.
A wedding poem is a portrait, not a greeting card. It should look like the couple, not like love in general.
The escape from both traps is the same door: specificity that everyone in the room can understand. Simple surface, particular content. That combination is genuinely hard, which is why the request deserves more respect than poets usually give it.
The Interview Comes Before the Poem
My first wedding poem failed because I wrote it from what I knew of my cousin, which turned out to be a child's knowledge, ten years stale. The poem praised a person she no longer was. Nobody said so, everyone clapped, and I watched her fiance's polite face and understood I had written about a stranger.
Now I never write a line before the interview. Sit the couple down, separately if you can manage it, and ask questions. You are not gathering compliments. You are hunting for the three or four details that belong to this couple and no other couple on earth.
The Seven Questions That Find the Poem
- How did you actually meet? Not the anniversary version, the true version. The wrong train, the borrowed lighter, the friend's terrible party. The poem usually lives here.
- What does the other person do that no one else knows about? This question produces gold roughly every time. He labels the leftovers. She talks to the car.
- What was the moment you knew? Rarely the proposal. Usually a Tuesday. One groom told me it was watching his partner carry a spider outside in a glass, apologizing to it.
- What do you argue about? Used gently, one small recurring argument, the thermostat, the navigation, makes the whole poem believable, and rooms laugh with relief at the honesty.
- What object holds your story? A couch they carried up four flights, a passport, a dented pan. Objects give a poem a spine.
- What is a phrase only you two say? Private language, borrowed with permission, lands like a secret shared with the room.
- What do you hope a Sunday looks like in thirty years? This gives you the ending: forward motion, concrete, no abstractions required.
Record the answers in their own words. Half your best lines will be things they said, tightened.
What to Refuse, Politely
- The word 'journey.' It has carried too many weddings and its knees have gone.
- 'Soulmate,' 'destiny,' 'meant to be.' Fate is less moving than choice. Two people choosing each other on ordinary evidence is the actual miracle.
- Weather metaphors doing the whole job: love as sunshine, storm, rainbow. Weather belongs to everyone; this poem belongs to two people.
- Rhyme you cannot control. If 'forever' summons 'together' and 'love' summons 'above,' write unrhymed lines with strong rhythm instead. A wedding audience needs cadence, not chimes.
- Anything the couple would not say in front of both grandmothers. You are a guest in this marriage. Behave.
A Worked Example: Kit Version vs Portrait Version
Suppose the interview told you: they met when her moving van blocked his driveway, he labels leftovers with dates, and their private phrase is 'tea first,' meaning no serious talk before the kettle. The kit version writes itself:
Two hearts became one on that special day,
a love that grows stronger in every way.
Polite applause, instantly forgotten. Now the portrait version, built from nothing but the interview:
It started with a van parked wrong, and a man
too polite to knock, who waited, and then helped carry boxes.
Marriage is this, mostly: the kettle on before the hard talk,
your name and the date on whatever is saved for later.
Four lines, plain vocabulary, one hearable turn, and it belongs to exactly one couple. Notice the craft is hidden but present: the list structure, the small repeated idea of saving and labeling turned quietly into a metaphor for commitment by the final line. If you want the tradition behind this work, poets have been hired for weddings for well over two thousand years, and the epithalamium form guide shows how Sappho and Spenser handled the same assignment you just got by text message.
The Money Question, Since You Are Wondering
For strangers: charge. A commissioned wedding poem involves interviews, drafts, revisions, and a performance-ready reading copy, which is easily ten hours of skilled work. Quote a flat fee, half up front, two revision rounds included, final text delivered three weeks before the day. Put it in writing; weddings devour informal agreements.
For family and close friends, I take no money and set the same boundaries, because the boundaries, not the invoice, are what protect the friendship. Deadline for the interview, deadline for feedback, and one rule I state out loud: I will take any note on accuracy, but the final wording is mine. A poem written by committee reads like a treaty. Say all of this cheerfully in week one and the whole thing stays a gift instead of becoming a debt.
One more clause worth stating early: the veto. Tell the couple that if the finished poem does not feel like them, they may decline it, no explanations owed, and the wedding loses nothing. I have never had the veto used, but offering it changes the whole commission. People give you their real stories once they know they are not trapped into praising whatever you do with them.
Either way, insist on a rehearsal. Whoever reads the poem, you or the best man, must say it aloud twice before the day, slowly, with the pauses marked. I have watched a decent poem die in the mouth of an unprepared reader, and a modest one soar because the reader honored the line breaks.
The Frame on My Cousin's Wall
Ten years on, my cousin's framed poem still hangs in her hallway, and it still makes me wince, all that borrowed moonlight, not one true detail. But here is the thing I did not expect: writing wedding poems made me better at everything else. The discipline of being understood on first hearing, of earning emotion through evidence, of ending forward instead of upward, transfers straight into contest work. Some of the highest emotion scores I have ever given went to poems with a wedding poem's plain clarity, and our love poems collection is full of proof that particular beats grand every time. If you write one for a couple this summer and it turns out to have a pulse of its own, send a version to the monthly contest once the confetti settles; the five-criteria score will tell you honestly whether the portrait came alive, and entrants from more than fifty countries are testing love poems against the same rubric.
So answer the text. Say yes, then say 'but first I need an hour with you both, separately, and I will be asking about arguments.' The poem they want is already lying around their kitchen in plain sight. Your whole job is to notice it, tighten it, and hand it back wearing its good clothes.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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