Several years ago in an essay, I found myself invoking Robert Frost's wonderful statement, "We shall be known by the delicacy of where we stop short." I tried to use it as a standard that would resonate into our dealings with others, especially those most close to us, and into matters of aesthetics. What we choose not to do in a poem, for example, may reveal as much about us as what we choose to do. This seems particularly so if our subject involves family.

Yet as poets our fidelity to people we know is always complicated by our fidelities to the poem and the language we find ourselves using, not to mention to truth itself. While in many instances our subjects will be served by restraint, we can imagine in other instances that they might be served by extravagance, a going beyond proprieties and conventions. By the end of my essay, I found myself embracing Frost's statement andarguing for a poetry of uncommon, surpassing gestures. I don't think one necessarily excludes the other.

Nevertheless, poem--restrained or extravagant or some combination of the two--that involve or implicate family members should raise certain questions for those of us who write them. Why are we writing about this particular subject in the first place? Certainly we have the entire world of experience to draw from. Why this poem about brother, or mother? Why now? And what must such a poem do to involve strangers in what's personal to us? As the cry of its own occasion, a worthy poem ideally should suggest some answers to those questions.

My experience as both a writer and reader has convinced me that most poems about family should be put in a locked cabinet, like diaries, kept, if kept at all, as private data for our children to find after we're dead. Some family poems, of course, driven by necessity and in search of the elusive properties of their subjects, deserve the light of day. For them to merit this, their authors will have needed to develop new allegiance--to texture, tone, rhythm (to name just a few) as the poem evolved. In other words, pretty soon aesthetic matters as well as subject matter must be driving the poem. If not, there'll be Trouble in Poetry City with a capital T. Beware the poet who values content more than handling of content, a danger especially present in our most personal poems.

If poems about family are always going to involve some degree of personal disclosure, how that disclosure is tonally delivered, not to mention paced and framed, usually will determine its success. Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is interesting to examine in this regard. It is clearly a poem of extravagance, but not without discipline. Whatever we might think of its claims, it's clear that Plath had as much allegiance to sound pattern, rhythm, and to overall orchestration of effects as she did to indicting her father. It's an amazing vitriolic performance. Despite her bile, she remained committed to the poem as poem, a made thing, a system of words and sounds. It's a poem, though, that never confronts self, and which always asserts rather than explores. Yet it's only because of biographical reasons that we question its tone. If we were ignorant of her biography we would readily accept it as a poem of rage. Plath was burdened by the psychological weight of her perceived victimization, but of course didn't have to worry that the victimizer might see her poem. He was long dead. The poem reads like an exorcism, and she no doubt found a kind of radical freedom in its composition, a freedom achieved at high cost. Yet we can be sure that she was also liberated, paradoxically, by what was at the heart of her poem's complaint: her father's absence.

The dead free us as much as the living constrain us. But constraint, I would argue, is often a useful thing to feel. The need to suppress can be the impetus to transformation, to ingenuity, to the virtues of indirection. Think of how the dramatic structure in "Home Burial" gave Frost permission to examine and explore the alienation in a particular marriage. He must have felt that he needed such a construct (tantamount to a mask) to engage what was personal to him. Or how Roethke's rhymes and iambic trimeter in "My Papa's Waltz" helped create a tone that lightened what otherwise might be construed as a father's violence. Roethke's fidelity to form, we can say, kept the extravagant in check. We should consider it our good fortune that many poets haven't been able or have chosen not to address their subjects directly.

I know someone who is able to write about his adulteries because, he says, his wife is not interested in reading his poems. (That fact alone might be a good reason for adultery.) Yet I'm not sure that the freedom he feels necessarily makes for better poetry. It seems like a sad, not a radical, freedom, insufficiently hard won. Most of us are cognizant that the poem we write which implicates or involves our spouses or significant others will constitute a matter of delicacy. If at a certain time in our lives that sort of poem insists on itself, becomes necessary subject matter, then so be it. If handled more or less directly, we'll need to seek just the right tactics that will permit us to go far enough so that we understand what stopping short might mean. But maybe we'll pretend we're a flower, like Louise Gluck. Or find a strategy like Berryman's in his Dream Songswhere competing voices and rarefied syntax blur the purely autobiographical. Artifice will not only save poems, but perhaps marriages as well. The too-naked poem, one that makes dirty laundry its flag, which never gets beyond its original impulse, is a poem we have failed. We should hide it from everyone.

Is a poem ever worth the discomfort or embarrassment of, say, the family member it alludes to or discusses? Certainly many poets have thought so, especially since the advent of so-called Confessional poetry in the late fifties. My loosely held rule for myself is that if my poem has found ways to discover and explore its subject, if it has on balance become more of a fictive than a confessional act, the--regardless of its connotations--Iwill not be discomforted or embarrassed by it. But to raise the notion of the fictive is to also raise corollary questions. What, if anything, would we falsify, say about our mothers, for the sake of being interesting? Do family stories, written in the first person, make a covenant with the reader that implies a fidelity to the actual? If they were written in third person, would that covenant somewhat change? Put crudely, how many among us would sell out our grandmothers for an exquisite stanza? We know that Plath's father, for example, was not a Nazi. But no one knows for sure whether my mother in fact obliged me after I requested to see her breasts when I was twelve, as I claim she did in my poem "The Routine Things Around The House." I tell you here that she did. Would I have written so if she hadn't? I don't think I would have. I think, though, there aredetails that I made up. I've lived so long with the way I mythologized that event that I can't remember which ones are which. But I do remember feeling, after much revision, that all the details, fictive or actual, contributed to the poem's emotional veracity.

The truth is that for many years the poem made me uncomfortable. To mishandle such subject matter was to descend into the vulgar. When I was finally able to get myself to include it in a book, it was because I'd discovered its hidden subject. The poem was not just a provocative personal story about a mother's gracefulness under pressure, as I had thought, but was also about limits. The way she showed me her breasts and then buttoned up had taught me something important about when and how to stop short. When I realized that, the poem's conclusion, which had eluded me, came to me in seconds.

There are degrees of fidelity to the actual. I don't know a single poet who wouldn't hesitate at locating, say, a spousal argument in Paramus instead of Princeton if that change better served the poem's sonics. Though some family matters and memories should, I suppose, be sacrosanct, very few, even with the best of intentions, are immutable. In essence, they are emotionally incomplete without the stories that shape and subjectify them. Large events in our lives especially have a para-factual existence. When we start talking about them we are already changing them.