Function
Form before function, right?
I was curious who Ted Kooser was and so I bought his new book, Delights and Shadows. Now I just read a link of Pablo Neruda's Sweden speech (Nobel Prize) and he says that it is "vanity" that makes a poet attack another or defend himself. Everything in poetry looks and feels like vanity. Anyway, Ted Kooser's book left a sour taste in my mouth. I can't help myself. I see the reviews on the back of the book and wonder if the "ordinary" is really that "remarkable." There doesn't seem to be anything of substance in a few of the poems. It is well-crafted. It is well-structured. But where's the function. It's like he's playing a great trick on us.
In "A Spiral Notebook" he writes about a "5 subject notebook." Kooser writes, "The bright wire rolls like a porpoise / in and out of the calm blue sea / of the cover..." (74)
Nails on chalkboard.
What is the difference in the work Neruda did compared to the work that Kooser is doing now. Obstensibly, they both are working with the mundane and making something come forth. They both ask their readers to come and sit with simple language. They're provincial: Kooser the midwest, Neruda, his native Chile.
It would be unwise to say that after reading one Kooser book that I am a Kooser scholar. I'm not pretending to be. I just wonder how long the poetry world will obsess with this idea that poetry must be accessible in order to merit those lofty "laurels." How many more poems about notebooks are American poets going to create before the readers just completely abandon reading and go buy an ipod?
Does anyone else think we better challenge our reader? I believe we have to have expectations of our readers--that they are intelligent, that they can put things together, and that they are looking for universal meanings earned in private utterances.
Thoughts?
posted by Jae Newman @ 7:17 AM
5 Comments:
Hell yes, Jae, and thank you for having the guts to question a Pulitzer-winning Poet Laureate! I haven't read much Kooser, and almost didn't finish reading your post because of that fact, but I have to agree that the word "accessible," which I believe poetry SHOULD be, seems often to be mistaken for "dumbed-down," or perhaps more accurately, the supposed "accessible poetry" is more like "accessible" objects or ideas described with elevated diction/imagery that borders on...well, to use a not-so-poetic, but very "accessible" word, hoighty-toighty (sp.?), a la Ted's notebook.
Billy Collins writes well-crafted, witty, high-quality "accessible" poetry (expect angry posts from Teneice if you refute this). If I were into poet-bashing, I would say Kooser should spend less time describing his notebook and more time writing abstractions INSIDE it! ;)
Billy Collins is a good example of what "accessible" poetry can be. On the surface his poetry is pretty easy to follow, but if you dig down deeper, there's more going on than you first notice. I think "accessible" poetry, sometimes called "performance" or "stand up" poetry can be good if it has other levels of depth to it like Collins' does. (I wrote an essay one semester at Spalding about Billy Collin's hidden depths, so I've thought about this some.)
I think there's a place for "accessible" poetry, because it does bring more people into poetry who otherwise would be too afraid to try it. But I think it's very, very hard to do it while keeping the layers of depth.
There is a long historical path leading up to this sort of accessible poetry ... beginning with the Modernists who wanted poetry to lose its affected language and get closer to everyday human speech. Perhaps "accessible" poetry without depth is the place where poetry had to ultimately go to at the end of that path. So perhaps "accessible" poetry is coming towards and end, and things will turn again and more complex poetry will become all the rage.
In any case, poets like W.S. Merwin prove you don't have to be accessible in order to get an audience. Personally, I prefer poetry where I have to do some work. Maybe because the first poet I really latched onto was T.S. Eliot - yikes!
Jae, a great essay for you to read would be Dana Gioia's essay "The Anonymity of the Regional Poet" that he included in his "Can Poetry Matter?" book of essays. He writes the essay specifically about what the poetic community is supposed to do with Ted Kooser, and how he thinks that 1) Ted is a great poet and 2) Ted doesn't offer a lot of satisfaction to contemporary poetry critics for a variety of reasons. It's a very interesting read, and I wish I could quote some chunks out of it for you. Well, here's one...
Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it is for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of the interpretations it provokes. Finding little challenge in Kooser's poetry, the enterprising critic is tempted to dismiss it. Surely poetry so simple must lack depth. While admitting to a certain superficial fascination, the critic qualifies his admiration by exploring the authors limitations, which in itself becomes a compelling critical activity. While defining a poet's limitations is a legitimate critical pursuit, limitations in themselves are not necessarily shortcomings....
This is from the third page of an 18-page essay. I urge all of you to look it up...
Ted Kooser is not to everyone's taste, but I admire many of his poems because they leave me with unforgettable images. The job of the poet has always been to make language MEMORABLE. I can't look at water coming out of a faucet anymore without thinking of Kooser's braid. And I can't see spiral notebooks anymore without thinking of porpoises.
Here's a key test of a writer's quality (proposed once by Sena Jeta Naslund in one of her lectures) -- write an original, fresh image for the moon. Ted Kooser has done so, impressively, with this description in his poem "November 12" in the book "Winter Morning Walks" --
"I sometimes /
take hold of the cold porcelain knob/
of the moon. . .
Also, Kooser is a decent guy. He once said that he doesn't think art (poetry) should be made out of other people's misfortunes. Something to think about...
Gwen
Woops --
That was a very bad mistake in my last email--
should be:
Sena Jeter Naslund
(two thousand lashes for me)
Gwen
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