ere it not for the way you taught me to look/ at the world, to see the life at play in everything,/ I would have to be lonely forever, writes Ted Kooser, our current Poet Laureate, of his mother in the poem “Mother.” (Delights and Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, 2004). Seeing life at play in the world around him is one of the unique qualities that make Kooser’s poems so enjoyable.
Kooser doesn’t simplify life: his language, although accessible and down to earth, bristles with comparisons that are fresh, often startling, and that push through to other psychological and emotional worlds. One of my favorite poems in Sure Signs (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980) is “Christmas Eve,” in which father and son sit down to talk as two bodies. The father carries his old heart/ in its basket of ribs, and both of them carry their common bones wrapped in new robes. They are so much alike we both weep at the end of his stories. This is a unique coupling of emotional and physical imagery.
Sometimes the poet gives us only a brief portrait, painted with a few deft strokes, an abstract of a place or person. “Notes on the Death of Nels Paulssen, Farmer, at the Ripe Old Age of 93” illustrates Kooser’s imagistic freshness and ironic humor: by the time of his death, it seems, there’s not much of Nels left.
A harvest of nail parings, a wagonload of hair – over his ashen fields, no dust in the air.
In Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), Kooser hones his natural bent for unique metaphor when writing about the Nebraska sandhills and the silent flow of water and time, barn owls and seduction, and city limits and self-imposed human limits. And growing up is shown to be the beginning of the hard knowledge that we are a part of Earth's perpetual erosion. "An Abandoned Stone Schoolhouse in the Nebraska Sandhills" explores mortality in a terse and intense style: Put your palm flat on these stones./ Something is happening under the surface:/even in sunlight, the stone feels cool,/as if water were trickling inside.../ a ... shadowy river, cleaning itself.../rubbing away at our names and our voices.
To lighten the journey, there's love. "Barn Owl" may be taken as a dark statement on seduction or as simply a bit of whimsy, with a garnish of dark humor. It is a song of seduction sung by the barn owl to that sweetheart mouse of mine. Behind the eyes of the owl is a boudoir of intimate darkness and the silks of oblivion. Gently the "affair" between the owl and the mouse nudges the poem into a grisly erotic world that ends in the destruction of the object of love. To be sure, this is not intended as a primer on love.
In "City Limits" Kooser notes that in exchanging adventure for comfort, people accept the physical and mental limitations imposed by towns and cities. In the following lines, the poet's empathy shows itself in the comradely "we." What we'd done to the Indians happened to us./ Our hearts had never been in it, this stopping; /we wanted a nowhere but gave ourselves over to gardens. The poem implies that our loss of a more “natural” nature, as opposed to cultivated gardens, has stunted us all, enclosing us in reservations of our own making.
An effective laboratory in which to study Kooser’s imagistic equations between the natural world , the world of objects, and the human world is the collection Winter Morning Walks(Carnegie Mellon Press, 2000), one hundred very short poems that he sent on postcards to poet friend Jim Harrison, during the days when Kooser was recovering from cancer surgery and treatment. Each poem is delightfully preceded by a weather report. (Most of these poems are twelve lines long, with only one twenty-one lines in length.) The poet wrests unexpected meaning from disparate elements in the equation: a flashlight and moonlight (“November 18”), a bank swallow and a half-burned love letter (“December 9”), a flock of birds and a loose wheel (“January 16”), among others.
January 16 The January thaw. A flock of several hundred small brown birds, all of one mind, crazily chases its tail across a muddy field and into a grove of trees. They are full of joy, like a wheel that breaks loose from a truck and bounds down the road ahead of the driver, then eventually slows and falls behind, wobbling onto a spot on the shoulder, rocking around on its rim, then settling with a ringing cry.
But it is in Delights and Shadows ( Copper Canyon Press, 2004) that the poet’s great skill in extending the subject matter of everyday life into psychological and emotional universes emerges full bloom. Is the book an American classic? You bet.
Beneath the protective layers of human evolution, who are we really? Koozer attempts an answer. In “Walking on Tiptoe” he is nostalgic about our animal heritage when he notes the gracefulness of motion in animals as compared to human lead-footedness – collateral damage caused by our responsibilities, the disciplinary actions that have fallen to us, even the killings. We walk around with our feet flat on the ground, our heels dug in, bound stiff in the skins of the conquered. Only sometimes at night when we walk quietly through the house, on tiptoe, so as to not disturb others, forcing ourselves to see in the dark, are we like the animals we dominate. He tells us about old age, which lies in wait for us, with sentiment and fellow feeling, rather than sentimentality. In “The Old People” we get the sense of how the very old are distanced from us. Far from the fire and far from our voices, they have entered a different condition of life, getting ready to push off from this world. And in “Tattoo,” a man who had once been strong as a stallion, fast and ornery and whose tattoo is still a point of pride with him, has become simply an old man picking up/broken tools… his heart gone soft and blue with stories. For a moment, the veil is pulled aside and we are revealed. As Pope Innocent X said when he looked at his portrait painted by the Spanish artist Velasquez: Too true!
Koozer also tells us about our “historical” heritage in the same language of restraint and compassion. A fine use of indirect classical allusion is found in the poem “Cosmetics Department,” where two women, dressed in black, bend towards each other, one applying the makeup on the other’s face, both gently sliding into a classic pose: Eye to eye,/breath into breath, they lean as if frozen forever:/ a white cup with two lithe figures painted in black/and the warm wine brimming. And “In January” the winds that roar past the Vietnamese café (certainly a by-product of a flawed foreign policy), and pass over the nearby city that creaks like an ancient wooden bridge, are transformed into the winds of death that rush under all of us. This imaginative and graceful transformation of concrete detail - in this case historical detail - into metaphor is the heart of poetry.
One of the most perfect examples of the merging of specific detail into compound metaphors, that is metaphors nested within each other, like Russian matryoshka dolls, is in “Bank Fishing for Bluegills”: the lightness of the aluminum boat at the end of its anchor rope wallows (the poet’s word) within it like a fat man/ who has fished all day and fallen asleep/and is dreaming of when he was a little boy. Years of floating alone have transformed him and he is now a man with a failing heart, …tethered only gently to this world. Memory, the boat, the fishing, the drifting, all move into the tenuousness of our hold on life. Kooser’s humanistic perspective on who we ultimately are is told in realistic, yet connotative, language.
In identifying the poetic tradition into which Kooser falls – of course, we don’t have to do this at all – some think immediately of poets such as Edgar Lee Masters and Edwin Arlington Robinson, that is, the so-called “regional poet” connection. I don’t. I think immediately of Emily Dickinson, because both poets are masters of the short form; but I quickly discard that choice, too, because Kooser and Dickinson are quite different in temperament, choice of subject matter, and intellectual concerns.
Dickinson, writing poems that could be compared to tightly wound-up springs, wrestled with the concept of God or god, and infuses generic rather than personal images - trains, ships, nature (wind, birds, sun, flowers, etc.) swimmers, and so forth - with her thoughts. Kooser’s images are pulled out of a diversified bag of objects, people, and places, the result of more direct and varied experience. If he is characterized by a leitmotif, it is the assignment of human and humane validation, a benediction, to the world around us; but the assignment is not a struggle. It comes naturally. (Of course, the expansion of images into psychological and emotional meanings is also in the tradition of Mallarmé, and Symbolism in general, but I won’t go there now. Already the Poetry Police are on their way to my sylvan bower; I can hear their spondaic steps coming up the walkway, as we speak.)
No - the poetic tradition that works for me is the imagery, observations, and informal language found in much of the ancient Chinese poets as mediated, for example, by The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry (translations by the classical scholar and translator Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, 1984). Other favorites are Cold Mountain (the poems of Han-shan, late eighth to early ninth centuries, Tang Dynasty) and The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases (the poems and prose of Lu Yu, 1125-1210 A.D., Southern Sung Dynasty), both also translated by Burton and published by Columbia University Press.
Take, for example, “Aboard a Boat, Reading Yüan Chen’s Poems” by Po Chü-I (772-846, T’ang poet).
I pick up your scroll of poems, read in front of the lamp; the poems are ended, the lamp gutters, the sky not yet light. My eyes hurt, I put out the lamp, go on sitting in the dark; a sound of waves blown up by head winds, sloshing against the boat.
The poem, written to the poet’s friend and fellow-poet, is informal in tone, impressionistic in manner, with the sound of the poems continued on in the eternal sounds of the water hitting the boat. The recording of the occasion of reading the poems also contains a compliment to the poet: his poems are natural and eternal. (The poem is not free verse, as Kooser’s poems are; rather, it is a formal quatrain with seven characters per line, and probably a sound pattern as well.)
Another T’ang poet, Li Po, expresses in conversational language that inviting trio of friendship, strong wine and the freedom of conversing till the wee hours of the morning. Behind the words is the consciousness that too soon we will lie down in, not on, the earth forever.
A Night With a Friend Dousing clean a thousand old cares, sticking it out through a hundred pots of wine, a good night needing the best of conversation – a brilliant moon that will not let us sleep - drunk we lie down in empty hills, heaven and earth our quilt and pillow.
Han-Shan, (or Cold Mountain, as he was called because of the place where he retired), in Poem #19, impresses upon us the importance of being practical and whimsical at the same time, as we embark on a difficult journey that may not ultimately be accomplished:
I wanted to go off to the eastern cliff – how many years now I’ve planned the trip? Yesterday I pulled myself up by the vines, but wind and fog forced me to stop halfway. The path was narrow and my clothes kept catching, the moss so spongy I couldn’t move my feet. So I stopped under this red cinnamon tree- I guess I’ll lay my head on a cloud and sleep.
Kooser’s poetry exhibits many of the same qualities that Burton admires in the Chinese poets (see Preface to The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry). In subject matter: variety, poems written for specific occasions, personal experience; in language: accessibility, informality, as if speaking to friends, and measured, not overblown speech; an appreciation of nature; freedom from pretense; and a humanistic down to earth feeling.
In "City Limits," quoted above, Kooser notes that our loss is that, although we Americans, pushing westward, sought adventure, we unfortunately gave ourselves over to gardens. Good poetry rarely gives itself over to gardens. The spirit of adventure ultimately hacks its way through stale poetic traditions and either rejuvenates an older style or invents a new one. Ted Kooser writes non-experimental poetry in rejuvenating, and rejuvenated, language that is simple, direct, fresh, and unmistakably his own.
© Joyce Nower