THE POETRY HOME REPAIR MANUAL
by
Ted Kooser
Hardcover, 163 pages
ISBN 0-8032-2769-8
Kooser advocates a simple theory of poetry saying something, true and heartfelt, that someone understands. While this doesn t mean a poem can t be cryptic, elusive, or ambiguous, it s important to keep obstacles between the poet and the reader to a minimum.
Kooser is also tied closely to the Imagist school. For him, good poems don t necessarily come from an idea, but by twists of language or little glimpses of life, and he trusts his impulse to write about something that catches his attention, so that meaning arrives almost unbidden from an accumulation of specific details. But none of this arrives instantly. While his poems appear vivid, it s because he revises toward clarity and freshness, often engaging in 20-40 revisions for a single poem.
But how to touch someone s heart without being guilty of sentimentality, the death ray in the literary critic s arsenal of weapons? Or just as problematic writing with such restraint that all emotion has been squeezed out of a poem? Somewhere in between is writing with what Jim Harrison calls human heat. Kooser s simple solution: Don t be gushy, but compose with sufficiently specific detail to show emotion. And don t forget the audience:
My objection is to a kind of
poem that feels to me as if it had been motivated by self-indulgence, a
poem that puts the need of the poet to talk about himself or herself far out in
front of the needs of the reader.
Perhaps there have always been
people who took up writing poems just so they could talk about themselves, but
self-indulgent poetry almost always disappears in time, a victim of its own
failure to engage the needs and interests of others. It takes a grateful audience to keep a poem
alive. Expression of feeling in poetry
ought to be measured against the reader s tolerance for such expression.
About poetic structure, Kooser is again quite practical. He notes many poets use a three-line stanza, but questions why possibly because it makes a poem look more orderly and suggests a relationship to music. He contends such stanzas often simply call attention to themselves and don t have any integrity as organized units of speech. Similarly, he argues against irregular punctuation, extreme variance in line lengths, odd spellings, esoteric terms, persistent use of the present tense, and the common anecdotal poem. What he urges us to do is put sufficient pressure on the composition of our own poems by being selective in the use of detail, rhythm, syntax, simile, and metaphor, and to use the art of these tools to heighten the poem s effect.
And contrary to writing what we know, which often leads to a first-person confessional poem, he suggests writing about things other than ourselves, a form of impersonal observation.
It s the details
that make experiences unique and compelling.
It s watching one particular old woman in a cardigan sweater burn
wallpaper in a barrel, pushing it down and down with a crowbar.
Consider the novelist Warren Fine who, during a solar eclipse, didn t watch the eclipse, but observed how animals behaved in the fading of light.
He knew the value
of specific, concrete observation, of paying attention to what was going on
right under his nose. He knew to keep
his attention on the specifics and to let the grand subjects emerge from
carefully observed particulars. The most
effective poetry is not likely to be built from a sweeping look at an enormous
panorama. It will more likely be found
in watching a dog sniff a button.
Poetry of impersonal observation is a kind of reporting to the reader, gaining an audience that, by its own natural curiosity, wants to learn something from the poet s report. What gains wider acceptance is the authenticity of the unexpected, unpredictable detail, something which feels more true because the poet must have actually experienced it.
Just keep in mind
that it won t be the birthday cake covered with twinkling candles that will
make readers feel that you were really at the party, but the bone-handled
serving fork with one tine missing and the place where the lace has pulled
loose from the hem of a tablecloth.
Even so, artful use of detail is not the central theme of a poem, but merely sets the stage. For Kooser, the best poems reach through the opaque surface of the world and give us a glimpse of an order beyond.
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