Three years ago, my father died. He was only 59 and returning from a visit to my sister who was pregnant with her first child. Jill had been a delicate child herself, and my parents went to see her largely because they were worried for her health.

In the Amtrak station, just after arriving home, dad collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. An hour or two later a blood clot in his lung suffocated him. My mother had just phoned to say he was undergoing tests. They called her away from the phone, and I jumped in my van to make the 45 minute drive, praying the whole way, knowing, somehow, the whole way that he would die.

When I ran through the emergency room door, looking for my mother, she saw me first, and said, simply, "He's gone, Dave."

I tell this story not because it's unique. In fact, many folks have this same kind of recollection--the pain of trying to reach someone before he or she dies, and failing to get there in time. So much can be left unresolved, with the scene playing again and again in memory's brutal eye--if only, if only. The value of the details, though, is that they underscore the difficulty of writing about what is most real and painful and important to us--it's not unique, and it's been written about before by better, more skillful writers than we are likely to be ourselves.

How do you write about a father's death without becoming maudlin or sentimental? Should poets risk the cheapening of the pain and power of the experience by reducing it to cliche or to the saccharine tugging of heart strings? Eulogy poems, like eulogies themselves, can manipulate readers into a position of pure discomfort, not allowing them the freedom to criticize the poem because the emotion itself is so genuine, even if the verse is hackneyed and trite. Unlike poems, eulogies happen fast and are part of the necessary ritual of remembering a woman's or man's best self before the world. When we import these problems into poetry, they stand the risk of manipulating our readers, our memories, and ourselves.

I've seen this difficulty often in writing workshops when the discussion moves from the poem to its therapeutic value for the writer. Both are important, but they are not the same thing. To make a poem is to make something that lives on its own, in the space between reader and writer, to make something from language, a construction that sings, or shows, or invites readers into familiar and new territory.When poetry becomes therapy, readers are stuck, like a distant therapist, nodding and saying, "And how does that make you feel?" Or they are forced to be a comforting friend, offering tissues and tea. They have been manipulated instead of being moved and invited into a realm of insight, feeling, music they had not previously known, or had known but had not yet articulated. That's a crappy thing to do to someone with a poem.

Writing about dead folks is also risky because we so often sanctify or vilify them. Once their voices have been stilled, we may filter their voices into angelic sounds that comfort us; or we may harden their images into difficult, hateful and static people we are just as good to be rid of. I don't know Sylvia Plath's daddy, but the bastard in her poems is calcified there as a bastard forever.

So how do poets pay attention to the important and impossibly difficult reality of grief? One of many answers, for me, has come in revisiting William Wordsworth's definition of poetry, which he and Coleridge set out in the preface to their Lyrical Ballads. Poetry, they wrote, is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility." Only since my dad's loss have I begun to understand both parts of this famous dictum.

As a younger writer, I grabbed onto the powerful feelings, the rush and adrenaline of freely spewing my emotional venom, joy, or grief on the page. But that was not poetry, often. Instead it was a temper tantrum, an orgasm, or therapy, better suited for a private journal.

I now see the wisdom of this definition comes in the second phrase, in the act of "recollection." Poetry provides a way of literally collecting, re-collecting our experience into forms, spaces, language that might have value outside of our immediate circumstance and need. Time, care, and skill make that recollection process more possible.

In the case of my father's death, it was nearly a year before I found a poem that came close to recollection, to having enough concrete and lasting value that it might live as more than either a rant or a greeting card. And I found it in both my dream life and my father's old dresser drawers.

I had been dreaming about him for months, often finding that I was the only one in the dream who knew he was dead, having to mediate between conversations we were having and those around us, who didn't seem to understand that he was no longer with us. In those months, I had also inherited many of his clothes. He was much larger than I, so tshirts and socks were pretty much the only items I could regularly use.

After drafts and drafts, I finally wrote this piece:

Medium

In my parents' home, all its familiar
rooms collapsed into a cutaway set,
I move without effort from the kitchen
table to my old bed, fall painlessly
into the basement where I am folding
laundry with my dead father. He deftly
pairs black socks, rolling their tops together,
and smoothes a pile of my mother's shirts with
a quick, firm caress, as if he enjoys
all of this, now that he is dead. And we
talk about teaching, about giving grades
to students' lives, and about my mother.
He tells me what it is like to be dead
as he picks blue dryer lint from his huge
mauve t-shirt that I'm now wearing.
How, I wonder, will I explain to her
that he finally folds clothes? I stand in
the back yard, alone, with the wind filling,
billowing this shirt, warm from the dryer
and so much larger than I remember.

What saved this poem, for me, what kept if from joining the other crumpled or deleted drafts, was that I could read it without weeping but could not read it without feeling the warm, large presence of my father inhabiting the very words as he had his mauve shirt. My grief had been made into something outside of myself; it had been recollected. The raw power of it remained, still to be dealt with. But here, in the poem, it also had become something distinct, something within the poem and out in the world.

I discovered a few months later just how many writers had taken the same approach, using objects, photographs, and spare, plain language as ways to contain their grief--in both the sense of keeping it in control and putting it inside a container. The poem becomes then a container of experience, a recollection point. Raymond Carver's "My Father's Wallet" and "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year" both do this beautifully, as does Maxine Kumin's amazing poem, "How It Is" about poet Anne Sexton. After putting on Sexton's jacket, the speaker says:

I will be years gathering up our words,
fishing out letters, snapshots, stains,
leaning my ribs against the durable cloth
to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

The contemporary poet Carolyn Forche offers another definition of poetry, but one that dovetails nicely here. Forche believes poetry should be a way to allow us to "experience experience. Poetry is what maintains our capacity for contemplation and difficulty. Poetry is where that contemplation and difficulty converses with itself."

To pay attention to grief is difficult and dangerous. But such conversations are precisely the sort poets and readers must have, with ourselves and with each other. Who knows in what combination of dreams and concreteness we will find the right ways to converse, recollect and contain.

David Wright's poetry, essays, and reviews have been widely published in places such as re:generation quarterly, 3rd Muse, 2River View, and many others. His first book is Lines from the Provinces.