Addressing a "You": Part 2, Imaginative Address

The second kind of “you” I’ll call the “you” of imaginative address. It is spoken only in imagination to another person. One famous example of this is Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Sylvia Plath

The poet is looking at a photo of her father (“You stand at the blackboard, daddy,/in the picture I have of you”), not speaking to him personally—“I was ten when they buried you”. The “you” addressed in the imagination is aimed at a specific person, but spoken only in theory to that individual. In this case, the person addressed is no longer even alive.

Plath’s poem shows the incredible dynamism of the “you” of imaginative address. The poet speaks her mind about her father, uncensored by the need to show the poem to the person addressed. She can be as brutally honest as she likes. Diplomacy be damned, she tells it like it is.

Many political poems are also spoken to a “you” of imaginative address, such as Anna Akhmatova’s “Imitation from the Armenian.” which she wrote in a sort of code, but the poem was clearly a challenge to the Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, who sent her son away to Siberian forced labor camps for seventeen years:

…was my little son

To your taste, was he fat enough?

(translated by D.M. Thomas)

If you write mostly to a “you” of imaginative address, it might be a worthwhile exercise to try writing to a “you” of personal address, where you actually give the writing to the other person. The content might be more cautious, but it also might be more probing, since you are actually communicating, not just venting.

Also try the reverse. If you usually write to a “you” of personal address, change it up. Write a secret poem or prose piece to that “you” that you would never show that person. It might bring to light emotions or ideas that you otherwise would never express.

More on writing to a "you" in the next blog.

Part 1 of Addressing a "You": Personal Address

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