1372 A Working Poet and Realer Art

Ted Kooser, as I’ve noted before, is the current poet laureate of the United States. Brad Leithauser’s review of his Flying at Night; Poems 1965-1985 (University of Pittsburgh Press) fairly drips with eastern snobbery in the August 7 New York Times Book Review (even though Leithauser was born and raised in Detroit).

He says it is the work of a retired businessman, “moving reflectively into middle age” writing poems that are focused and imposing few serious demands on the reader. He has a gift for simile and metaphor, the professor says, not complexity, pretentiousness, obfuscation and self-indulgence and he is rooted in one place, the Great Plains.

So I looked up Mr. Leithauser on Google. My knowledge of poets is darn lean--most are, well, too pretentious and self-indulgent. Found a poem about a car idling at the top of a cliff overlooking the ocean. Looks, smells and sounds like a suicide to me. Of course, I live in fly over country so I might be too dumb to figure it out. And as Leithauser says, “There’s something heartening about those poets . . whose lives reflect some vital integration of the “real world” and the realer world of art.” Do tell.

I didn't give a hoot about what happened to Leithauser's woman in June 1953 who'd filled the gas tank. Whereas Kooser's simple poem about a death of a child and her grieving parents brought tears.

The Last Odd Thing She Did by Brad Leithauser.

"A Child's Grave Marker"
by Ted Kooser

A small block of granite
engraved with her name and the dates
just wasn't quite pretty enough
for this lost little girl
or her parents, who added a lamb
cast in plaster of paris,
using the same kind of cake mold
my grandmother had--iron,
heavy and black as a skillet.
The lamb came out coconut-white,
and seventy years have proven it
soft in the rain. On this hill,
overlooking a river in Iowa,
it melts in its own sweet time.

Many thanks to Lynne who sent me the article.