July 6, 2015
Max’s Musings
By Max Molleston
This month seems like a good one to celebrate Ted Kooser, the Midwest poet. You readers may be aware I know Ted and have woven his poetry through this column for years. Now he is retired from decades in business and more involved in the produce of the English language, primarily poetry, but not exclusively. Lincoln, Nebraska, his workplace for decades, provided income and inspiration to set forth his poetic scenery through the lives he knew and those he cleverly imagined. This latest emphasis on Kooser’s work moved to me from a 1980’s paperback titled “On Common Ground,” featuring Kooser and three other Nebraska-centered successes from their poetry creations. Some of Ted’s earliest creativity is within the text. Examples here may refresh us all.
In A Country Cemetery in Iowa (dedicated to James Hearst)
Someone’s been up here nights,
and in a hurry,
breaking the headstones.
And someone else,
with a little time to spare,
has mended them;
Some farmer, I’d say,
who knows his welding.
He’s stacked them up in
harnesses of iron,
old angle iron and strap,
taking a little extra time
to file the welds down smooth.
Just passing through, you’d say
it looks like foolishness.
This small powerful poem took observation, initially, then an examination of what was seen, finishing with creative magic that reads and sounds commonplace.
Forty years in the past, your writer featured a small hilltop country cemetery and what is and was. I titled it “Heaven On The North.”.My wife and I see it as we drive past, to visit her brothers in their Iowa hometown. The cemetery, now a historical site, continues to inspire me. Another of Ted Kooser’s earlier poems:
Carrie
There’s never an end to dust
and dusting” my Aunt would say,
as her rag, like a thunderhead,
scudded across the yellow oak
of her little house. There she lived
seventy years with a ball
of compulsion closed in her fist,
and an elbow that creaked and popped
like a branch in a storm. Now dust
is her hands and dust her heart.
There’s never an end to it.
A word in this poem is new to me – Scudded. The dictionary says “moves fast,” so what can’t we learn by pausing for an informative glance into our trusty tome? No crosswordpuzzle to deal with.
Ted was interviewed in this particular book, “On Common Ground,” saying he felt poets should write for themselves. I agree. Whether he agrees now with that position, I don’t know. For that interview, he said most poets are not interested in what other poets are creating, prideful in their work, alone. Does a stand thirty five years in the past, remain? Yes and no. In creating prose or poetry, I have always wanted to know what some others are producing. Maybe it comes from my long career as a reporter. Perhaps there is some feeling of mentoring there. It was very valuable in my professional years and is now in my writing and poetry. Ted Kooser’s poetry is noted for its brevity, its perfect content, and its impact on readers, perhaps more than listeners.
Wow, we are into summer, heading out of it, if we rely on the Iowa Legislature’s new law to hold off school starts until the Iowa State Fair is concluded. I certainly wanted you to enjoy our brief journey with my friend Ted Kooser.
Join me in August, when school kids have three weeks of summer left.
