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Witness in the Poetry ofTed Kooser

Born and raised in Ames, Iowa, Ted Kooser has lived for many years in Garland, Nebraska. A teacher of poetry and nonfiction at the University of Nebraska in nearby Lincoln, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize also edits a weekly poetry column, “American Life in Poetry” (www.https://americanlifeinpoetry.org). His poetry depicts a fading world as seen in Ektachrome slides — of family, land, pets, antique teacups, old vehicles and tools — and as Brad Leithauser noted in the New York Times Book Review, it “is rare for its sense of being so firmly and enduringly rooted in one locale.” His poems speak of the weather, arbiter of crop futures and human futures — of hoarfrost and blizzards, searing heat and floods. But they also celebrate the small moments of the heart and everyday pleasures. In the poem, “At Nightfall,” the poet describes the flight of a barn swallow bringing back one white feather to her nest in the rafters, and in “A Morning in Early Spring,” he notes, “In the first light I bend to one knee. I fill the old bowl of my hands/with wet leaves and lift them…”

Reaching beyond the boundaries of small town life, his writing reminds us of our common connections. As David Mason observed in Prairie Schooner, this poetry is beyond regionalism — it’s about “perception itself, the signs of human habitation, the uncertainty of human knowledge and accomplishment.” At times, it can seem almost archeological, as in the poem “The Red Wing Church,” which describes a partially deconstructed church, or in “In the Basement of the Goodwill Store,” a place populated by “doll heads, and rust,” and an old man “trying on glasses.,,,” “…through which he looks to see you looking back.” Kooser’a poetry exhibits what, in Hindu philosophy, is called Sakshi, or witness, a neutral perspective of looking at the world. This quality is apparent in several poems from Kindest Regards — in “Old Soldier’s Home,” for instance, and in “A Letter in October,” but there are many other examples. While Sakshi has been described as the witness of the flow of thought and feeling in an ever-changing world, Chitchhaya, is the reflection of the ego or the residue, it might be said, of personality. It resembles “the moon with its bruises,” the “chalk” on the porch post, “the old yellow shell” of a snakeskin, and “a whisper of dust,” to quote Kooser. This quality of witness in his poetry appears as emotion filtered through a frayed screen door, as a face behind a lace curtain, a tenuous separation between inside and out. 

Another aspect of the witness function in poetry concerns the acknowledgment of traumatic events such as those of war or social injustice, and this, too, can be found in his work, although it’s the exception. “Fort Robinson,” for instance, depicts the killing of infant magpies by grounds keepers on the site where the Northern Cheyenne were held captive one “terrible winter,” and “Blackout” describes domestic air raid practices during WWII as seen through the eyes of a six-year old. In “Blizzard Voices” he tells of the devastation of the “Children’s Blizzard” of 1888. Sometimes, the subject involves economic upheaval, as in the poem “Three Steps in the Grass,” which tells how a desperate homeowner bulldozed his house and set it on fire to avoid paying property taxes.

One of his most compelling poems, “Pearl,” describes a visit he paid to a childhood friend of his late mother’s. It evokes not only a sense of loss and the isolation of old age, but a more intimate time when we communicated in person rather than through emails and text messages. It’s this depiction of a fading era that characterizes much of his poetry and has given him a reputation as an elegist. An abandoned tractor, rusty harness bells, a WWI helmet, and “a heap of enameled pans as white as skulls” are a few of the objects from the past that appear in his lines. But, besides a certain wistfulness for days gone by, his work contains a balance of fresh and worn, of young and old, and an abiding wonder at the present moment.