Posted on 11/11/2004 8:16:48 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
The nation's new poet laureate, Ted Kooser, drove without a second thought across the red-blue fissure of the elections - two days on the road from his Nebraska home to his splendid aerie by the copper dome of the Library of Congress. He listened to Bach, not Limbaugh, as he crossed the Appalachian Mountains and headed down into this politics-crazed place, arriving as an aberration: an American filled with notions apart from partisanship.
"This is really an apolitical position, and I think it ought to stay that way," Mr. Kooser laconically ruled, disappointing anyone who thought that as the nation's first Great Plains poet laureate, he would perch here and make lyrical sense of the latest divide to obsess the capital city.
Mr. Kooser's worldview is hardly that parochial. He writes long-term of mankind, political and not, as one of many skeletons down at your local bone museum: "This is the only one in which once throbbed a heart/ made sad by brooding on its shadow." That covers far more than electoral disappointment, and Mr. Kooser arrives with a far more exotic work ethic than the typical talking head.
He wrote poems for decades as an insurance company executive, arising at 4:30 in the morning to compose. He made sure that his secretary critiqued the 30 or 40 rewrites he did to keep them taut and frill-free.
After decades of writing, the poet likens a poem to a teleidoscope, the playful round-lens device that, when focused on life's routine, turns it extraordinary. The capital can surely use at least one teleidoscope among its batteries of 24/7 news lenses. But Mr. Kooser figures that he'll manage no fresh poems in the year he works as a kind of bardic lobbyist (valued at $35,000 a year) for more Americans to try a poem.
"Sept. 11 happens, and tens of thousands of people try to write poems about it," Mr. Kooser notes, talking about the possibilities of his post. "What it is, is our need to find order in an extremely disorderly world. Poetry is sort of a small piece of order." All the more reason this city cries out for his teleidoscope. But the laureate makes no promise in this bazaar of promises. "Maybe there's a chance I can find something small and specific here that I can work with," the poet says, waxing doubtful.
He writes prose in lines and claims he is a poet...and his poems are full of cliches...
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=10125&poem=98626
Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.
Ted Kooser
"At the other side of the galaxy, a star thirty five times the siz of our own sun exploded and vanished"...nice, but not poetry.
Why not say:
A star
now a Nova of beauty
our sun merely a splinter
to be shamed by the light
Ah, but now
it is no more.
That would be poetry...
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