Uncles
Write the family's loose thread: the teller of tall tales, the empty chair, the man who taught you the wrong things brilliantly.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about uncles: family portraits, honest imagery, craft techniques, cliches to avoid, and original writing prompts by Writory.
What this theme is
An uncle poem works the edge of the family circle. The uncle appears at intervals, holidays, funerals, the occasional unannounced Tuesday, and because he is intermittent he is memorable: the coin tricks, the car that was never quite legal, the opinions delivered like weather reports. He is often the child's first evidence that adulthood has more than one possible shape. Where a father models the expected life, the uncle models an alternative, better or worse, and the poem's charge comes from the child measuring the two.
The theme runs from comedy to elegy without changing clothes. The same uncle who dominated Christmas with stories may be the man the family discusses in lowered voices, the drinker, the gambler, the one who went away. Uncle poems are frequently about the gap between the legend a child adored and the troubled man the adult later understands, and that double vision is where the strongest work lives.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose uncles for the same reason novelists do: they are licensed eccentrics, carrying the family's untaken roads. An uncle lets a poet examine masculinity at one remove, tenderness disguised as roughhousing, failure worn as flamboyance, without the freight a father poem drags behind it. The theme is also rich in voice; uncles are talkers, and a poem that catches an uncle's actual speech has half its work done.
There is honest emotional business here too. Many people are grieved by an uncle's decline or death in ways they have no ceremony for, the loss is real but socially minor, and poetry is precisely the place for griefs that fit no official occasion.
Where it comes from
The uncle enters poetry mostly through the side door of the family portrait, and the twentieth century opened that door wide. The confessional movement, Lowell, Sexton, Snodgrass, made every relative admissible evidence, and Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) includes an unsparing, loving portrait of his Uncle Devereux, seen by a child who half understands the man is dying. Lucille Clifton's spare family poems showed how a whole lineage can live in a few short lines.
Lorna Dee Cervantes's “Uncle's First Rabbit” (1981) traced a man's lifetime of violence and wanting-to-leave back to a single boyhood kill, a masterclass in letting one scene carry forty years. The folk tradition matters here as well: the uncle is the archetypal teller of tales, and many cultures route their oral history through him.
The elements that carry it
- His vehicle: the motorbike, the van, the improbable car, freedom parked outside a settled house.
- Tricks and skills passed sideways, coin behind the ear, whistling with two fingers, cards, knots, the curriculum parents never teach.
- The smell and sound of him: tobacco, engine oil, aftershave, the laugh audible from the far end of the street.
- Chairs and absences: the seat he always claimed, the years nobody set his place, the funeral where the stories finally reconciled.
- Money as gesture: the folded note pressed into a child's hand, extravagance from a man who owned almost nothing.
Techniques that work
- Catch his voice first: write down five sentences the uncle would actually say, and build the poem's rhythm around the best one.
- Use the child's adoring view for the poem's surface and let one adult detail, a tremor, an empty bottle, a court date, show through it like a watermark.
- Structure the poem around a taught skill, and let the teaching scene stand for everything he could not say directly.
- Write the legend and the fact side by side: the story he told about himself, then the version the family knew, without adjudicating between them.
- For an elegy, inventory what he left, tools, debts, a trick nobody else can do, and let the objects argue about who he was.
Mistakes to avoid
- The stock “fun uncle” with no interior. Give the entertainer one unguarded moment, the joke that stops halfway, the look out the window.
- Moralizing his failures. The poem should understand the drinking or the leaving, not sentence it; judgment closes the poem, curiosity opens it.
- Nostalgia without cost: if he was difficult, the difficulty belongs in the poem, or the affection reads as a child's view never updated.
- Explaining what he meant to you. Cut “he taught me so much” and keep the two-finger whistle you still do at fifty.
An exercise
Write a poem in which an uncle teaches a child one specific skill, real or invented, in real time: eight to fourteen lines, present tense, with at least three lines of his actual speech. Do not describe his character; let the teaching do it.
A challenge
Write two versions of the same uncle: the tall-tale version he told about himself, and the plainer truth. Then write a third, short poem in which both versions attend his funeral. Keep only the third poem.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about the object an uncle left behind, in a shed, a will, a coat pocket, and the moment someone in the family finally understands what it was for.
Before you submit
- At least one line carries his actual manner of speaking.
- The portrait includes one unguarded or contradictory moment.
- Nothing moralizes; the poem observes rather than sentences.
- A taught skill, object or gesture carries the relationship.
- The ending is his, an image of the man, not a summary of the lesson.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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