American Wedding, by Joseph Millar

Resource for Grades 7-12

American Wedding, by Joseph Millar

Media Type:
Video

Running Time: 2m 49s
Size: 8.2 KB


Source: Poetry Everywhere

This media asset comes from Poetry Everywhere filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Resource Produced by:

WGBH Educational Foundation

Collection Developed by:

WGBH Educational Foundation

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This video segment from Poetry Everywhere features the poet Joseph Millar reading his poem “American Wedding” at the Dodge Poetry Festival. A father watches his daughter at her wedding, and is filled with mixed emotions. He is proud of her, he loves her, he knows she is happy and in love, but he can’t help feeling the precariousness of her situation as she prepares to embark on adult life.

For a biography of the poet Joseph Millar, please visit the Poetry Foundation Web site.

open Background Essay

A father watches his daughter at her wedding and captures the scene. He is proud of her, he loves her, he knows she is happy and in love, but he can’t help feeling the precariousness of her situation. She is about to embark on adult life, married life, with children, a house, and other responsibilities. Deeper than that, he worries about what can drive a husband and wife apart, how the routine of "funerals, car payments, taxes, kids throwing up in the night" can begin to overshadow and replace the love that brought them together, so that even "if you manage to stay together/There will be nights you lie down/Like strangers back to back/Falling away from each other in sleep."

As he watches the Jewish wedding unfold with its unfamiliar traditions, (“young men will soon bear me up on a chair/a floating throne over the circle, clapping and singing”), the father observes but also reflects on his own experience. The wedding brings together two families—his represents a string of marital failures: “Divorced, remarried, adopted, nervous.” Should he warn the bride and groom? He seems to set up a question at the beginning of the poem, explores the messiness and richness of family life, and then draws us back to beautiful imagery at the end.

For more information and teaching resources about poetry please visit the Poetry Foundation Web site.


open Discussion Questions

  • How do the elements of a Jewish wedding, which are unfamiliar to the narrator, help him gain perspective on his daughter’s experience? How does his experience parallel hers?
  • Here are adjectives used to describe the narrator’s family:
    “My small, wan gaggle of distant family
    Plumps together next to the aisle,
    Divorced, remarried, adopted, nervous.
    Our dead father’s third wife coughing behind my step-children,
    Ex-wife, half brothers, motley, ragged,
    one nephew wearing a baseball cap.”
    What is the effect of these adjectives? Why does the narrator describe his family this way?
  • Why do you think the poem is called, “American Wedding?”
  • What does the poet think of marriage? What might the perfume of the “fleshy rose” pinned to his lapel represent or symbolize to him?

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