Write About Someone You Love Without Revealing Who They Are

Jennifer Tseng

If the prompt feels impossible, it is. You have been taught to include specifics & it will be counterintuitive to withhold meaningful details about a beloved person. Do it anyway. Keep the secret details for yourself. Your private memories will help you survive the exercise.

If the prompt feels impossible, it isn’t. In order to reveal someone, you must know them deeply & this is someone you thought you knew but whom you do not know. Take comfort in the fact that your bewilderment in the face of your own wrongness will help you write. You cannot reveal what you do not know. This is a built-in safety mechanism.

Final constraint: What you thought was the beginning, that which you had long waited for, by turns patiently & impatiently, peacefully & restlessly, ardently & with as much willpower as you were capable of summoning, is the end. The prompt relies heavily on this constraint: What you think is the beginning is the end.

The Yale Review · “Write About Someone You Love Without Revealing Who They Are” by Jennifer Tseng

what surprised you about the composition of this poem?

The one thing I remember about the composition of this poem is my surprise at the emergence of a more capacious addressee. What began as a specific “you” became increasingly anonymous as I wrote. This anonymity, the poem’s swerve to include not just one person but any person, helped me move beyond the limits of my own experience. The anonymous “you” simultaneously afforded me more distance from my particular pain and granted me a much-needed closeness with imagined others.

Jennifer Tseng is the author of Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, poems made with her late father’s English letters, which won the Juniper Prize for Poetry.