Family

In 1985, at the age of 23, I created Family, a collection of thirty concrete poems. I drew each “family” carefully by hand, using a Sharpie of some kind, adding the poems to spiral-bound typewritten pages that gave each family a roman numeral, and a page number. I don’t recall putting the poems in any particular order, except for the families I wanted first and last. My thinking was to represent as many kinds of biological families as I could think of, and yet so many more would be obvious to add. Around this time, I remember reading R. D. Laing’s The Politics of the Family, hoping it might help with these graphic depictions of real and imagined families, or give me ideas for additional possibilities. It didn’t help—or rather, reading the book was not necessary, because its agenda differed greatly from mine. If I were to do such concrete poems today, I would enlarge the presentation of families with LGBTQ+ possibilities. The following, though, are all the poems I came up with in 1985. What meaning might each depiction suggest? Which family might be yours? And which family depiction might be “ideal,” at least to you? I wish I hadn’t used watermarked bond paper for this project, but at the time it seemed fancier.

—6 January 2026, Sammamish, Washington