from “Attic” by JUSTIN VITIELLO 

What Vitiello is doing in this poem is establishing an ethos for his Italian-American family, just by listing the things they have in their attic. (Some of these things won’t be familiar to you, because they’re from times long past, or from Italian-American culture, but Richard can explain them.)  Here’s the poem:

spare parts of grandma's wheelchair
the high button shoe that's her rod 
my old maid aunts' trousseaux 
grandpa's Sunday suit and spats 
the tophat he wears to jail 
piles of his Daily Worker 
(brittle as the walls) and 
the law degree my father waves 
to bail him out 

the lead pipes my uncles cherish 
the gutters they ascend 
a civic award for Italian Baptists 
and some lire big as kerchiefs 
we can't change on Ellis Island 

grooveless records of the Great Caruso 
the china set he shatters 
the speaker that is his trumpet 
and in the console 
stogey ashes 

the iron stove where my Jewish mother 
learns to cook Neapolitan style 
an egg-beater full of cobwebs 

like an abandoned beehive 
and the gyroscope, too subtle for me to spin, 
my father produces after months away 

Now that you’ve experienced the ethos Vitiello established for his family just by showing us the things they had lying around, I want you to do the same for your family. First, generate a list as long as you can of things in your family’s home (now and/or in the past) – this is basically a freewriting. Then pick the ones of those that show us something you want us to see about your family. Write out this second list on a piece of paper and turn it in. 

Congratulations; you’ve just written your first poem. (Or maybe your second one, or your hundred-and-second one.)
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