This Old Verse: Ted Kooser's Poetry Manual

After reading The Poetry Home Repair Manual by poet laureate emeritus Ted Kooser.

When I've seen an episode of "This Old House" on TV, the wood shapes as easily as butter under the adzes and saws of the craftsmen, and the remodeled porch is complete in thirty minutes. Then I try for an hour to hang a mirror, and make a mess.

In the same way, easygoing Ted Kooser makes writing poetry seem simple, just a matter of developing an initial idea and making some choices along the way, using the tools available -- the title, the first impression, the sounds, the senses, the form on the page, the metaphors and similes.

Kooser's examples come mostly from poets working today. He uses some of his own poems, and shows us failed drafts, too. Almost every example earned my seal of approval, "Ah!" in the margin... often with a "Ha!" too. Kooser's own story, beating the sun up to write at his farm each morning before his commute to the insurance office in town, is as inspirational as the text.

But, as with "This Old House," when I tried to complete the one poem I've had in mind for a few years, I bogged down.

This doesn't take away from his book's value. Kooser gently but firmly decries the critics and professors whose self-worth is based on perpetuating the perception that "baffling" poems are better than ones that are "accessible" at first reading. (He chooses examples that are accessible at first reading, that also reward repeated readings.) He preaches and demonstrates how poems "freshen the world," as he illustrates early in the book with this poem, "Fire Burning in a Fifty-Five Gallon Drum" by Jared Carter:

Next time you'll notice them on your way to work
or when you drive by that place near the river where the stockyards used to stand, where everything

is gone now. They'll be leaning over the edge
of the barrel, getting it started. . .

Kooser takes that first line to describe all good poems: "Once we have read and been affected by a poem, our awareness of its subject -- in this instance a group of men huddled around a barrel -- may be forever heightened and made memorable (p. 7)."

Near the end of the book, Kooser enlarges this idea still more to hint at a metaphysical or even religious function for poems. He admits that, if he lives another twenty years, he may even come to believe in a God who cares about what he does. Until then, though, he feels more and more certain that all things are connected, and poems -- especially through metaphor -- help us to see that.

He assures us that we won't make a living writing poems. At the end, though, he points out that we work on a poem hoping that this one will be memorable and touching and insightful; and out there are readers hoping to find just such a poem. Put it that way, the avocation of writing poems seems a hopeful one.