Ted Kooser’s WINTER MORNING WALKS

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WINTER MORNING WALKS: ONE HUNDRED POEMS TO JIM HARRISON, Ted Kooser. Carnegie-Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, 2000, 120 pages, $15.95, https://www.cmu.edu/universitypress/.

I am here to confess that I have been making everything hard. What brings on such a mood—a straitjacket twisting my arms up and bunching my shoulders so my muscles cramp—is often the newspaper, its heavy thump on the drive, the leaden headlines, the AP wire photographs of bombed buildings. From there it spreads, so that my life seems difficult. A daily walk becomes a burden instead of a gift. Instead of happily co-existing with my old dog, I begin worrying over him. Gratitude, another daily habit, is only one more chore.

In such a state, how lucky to have picked up this book by Nebraska poet Ted Kooser. From the back cover:

Great poetry, like Kooser’s, like Chekhov’s stories, is not sentimental, but it is characterized by a kind of tender wisdom communicated with absolute precision.
–Jonathan Holden, The North Dakota Quarterly

I have sung Kooser’s praises before, and so I won’t go on and on today (for two of them, see links here and here.) In brief, this book came about when Kooser was recovering from cancer surgery and radiation; he writes  in the short preface:

During the previous summer, depressed by my illness, preoccupied by the routines of my treatment, and feeling miserably sorry for myself, I’d all but given up on reading and writing. Then, as autumn began to fade and winter came on, my health began to improve. One morning in November, following my walk, I surprised myself by trying my hand at a poem. Soon I was writing every day.

He walked before first light—his oncologist had told him to stay out of the sun for a year—and each day he wrote a short poem, pasted it onto a postcard, and sent it to his friend, writer Jim Harrison. What could be simpler? And how lucky are we, to have the record of these poems, a whole chain of 100, stepping stones, or a daily prescription to be taken, each made of close observation and (often) dazzling metaphor.

november 9

Rainy and cold.

The sky hangs thin and wet on its clothesline.

A deer of gray vapor steps through the foreground,
under the dripping, lichen-rusted trees.

Halfway across the next field,
the distance (or can that be the future?)
is sealed up in tin like an old barn.

—Ted Kooser

My work isn’t hard, not even this work of putting up a blog post each week. Read a book of poems. Share one poem. (I make it hard, by wanting the post to be a “real” review, but it needn’t be. Let’s call it an “appreciation,” a little celebration, sharing with my friends a book I enjoyed.)

Kooser’s postcard poems are about his walks, about reminiscences of his childhood, about his old dog, Hattie. They are made of homely things, bedsheets and sewing machines and birds. They are, like the birds, “full of joy.” The first poem (above) is from November 9 and they continue through March 20:

The vernal equinox.

How important it must be
to someone
that I am alive, and walking,
and that I am writing these poems.
This morning the sun stood
right at the end of the road
and waited for me.

—Ted Kooser

So here I am, just past this year’s vernal equinox, with daffodils tipping back their heads and shouting into the rain. And here I am, with this book.

Photo by Tina Nord, via pexels.com

Jill McCabe Johnson: DIARY OF THE ONE SWELLING SEA

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DIARY OF THE ONE SWELLING SEA, Jill McCabe Johnson. MoonPath Press, P.O. Box 445, Tillamook, OR 27142, 2013, 55 pages, $16, paper, http://MoonPathPress.com.

Jack Hill, reviewing Jill McCabe Johnson’s Diary of the One Swelling Sea for Prairie Schooner, described it as “a wrenching reminder of why the sea must be loved, cherished, and protected.” I agree.

As I read, I kept thinking of this passage from Rilke’s The Duino Elegies:

Perhaps we are here only to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower….But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely that the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ninth Elegy” (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

McCabe Johnson lives on Orcas Island, in the San Juans, and, in these poems, we have so much naming. Some of the terminology was familiar to me: driftwood, coral, plankton, barnacle and shark. But much was not, and the poems introduced to my mind’s eye a whole world of creatures: monkey cups, kelee shad, brackenmuck, gillraker, ulve-weeds, black-tailed godwits. (My mind’s eye and my Google Search, I should say.) The names don’t obscure the poems but animate them. Lia Purpura describes them as “entries in a daybook, bejeweled moments, cries from the heart” (back cover).

My favorites among the poems let us glimpse the observer, too, as we see here: [Note: I struggled to get the format to work, and couldn’t. My new practice is to move it from a Word document, but it didn’t work this time—thus, the snapshot.]

To learn more about McCabe Johnson, visit her webpage: https://jillmccabejohnson.com/index.html. In brief, she has four books of poetry, including Tangled in Vow & Beseech, which was a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award and will be released by MoonPath Press this year.

image from iStock

Sarah Kain Gutowski: THE FAMILIAR

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THE FAMILIAR: POEMS, Sarah Kain Gutowski. Texas Review Press, Huntsville, TX 77341, 2024, 94 pages, $21.95, paper, texasreviewpress.org.

I reviewed this book at Escape Into Life (EIL), but now that the hard copy has arrived I’m dipping into its pages again, still feeling astounded by its chutzpah.

From the cover:

Gutowski’s poems are breathtakingly smart—controlled, precise and exquisite as diamonds—and yet they vibrate dangerously from within, as if anticipating, as she writes in one poem, “so much broken glass.” –Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

You can visit EIL (see link below) to read more about what I find fascinating about the story-in-poems of one woman’s prism of selves (Ordinary Self and Extraordinary Self are the main characters). Here, one poem in its entirety:

Recurring Catastrophes

My ordinary self is not great at networking.
Her conversation’s void of art and humor, not
because she doesn’t know what to say but rather

her dearth of interest. She won’t respond to emails,
schedule dinner dates, return phone calls—all gestures
other ordinary people make to stay connected

and maintain relationships. My ordinary self runs
a little warm when asked about her lack of friends.
If I become distracted by other people and their

other problems, she once said, how can I focus on ours?
At this point in our life, she is correct—fires keep
erupting at home, and spread to school, to work,

and on the flat, dry road to the grocery. Everywhere, smoke
and heat and the need to escape. My extraordinary self
is never around for these recurring catastrophes

but my ordinary self and I can feel her like the tremor
underfoot when a house folds its charred frame to the ground:
somewhere, she’s smiling, her eyes hot and gray as ash.

—Sarah Kain Gutowski, The Familiar

Gutowski is also the author of Fabulous Beast: Poems, which won the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry. In addition to checking out my review at EIL, you can learn more about the poet at her page at Texas Review Press, and at her personal website.

 

THE ART OF REVISING POETRY

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THE ART OF REVISING POETRY: 21 U.S. POETS ON THEIR DRAFTS, CRAFT, AND PROCESS, edited by Charles Finn and Kim Stafford. Bloomsbury Academic, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK, 2023, 156 pages, $20.96, paper, www.bloomsbury.com.

https://www.kimstaffordpoet.com

For this week, a departure from the usual one-poet book. I came across The Art of Revising Poetry last year while in Livingston, Montana, where I bought On a Benediction of Wind: Poems and Photographs from the American West—poems by Charles Finn, photography by Barbara Michelman (I will have a post on this book next week).

When I looked up Finn to learn more about him, I discovered that he and Kim Stafford—a poet well known to me—had collaborated on an anthology of poems and essays about revision, not yet released. I put it on my wish list, and in December I found it at my library. (I’m going to have to buy my own copy.)

The opening essay is worth the price of admission, and includes a list of 12 suggestions for revision. The first:

  1. How could the poem’s title be more intriguing, prophetic, indelible? It’s been said the title of the poem holds about 20 percent of the poem’s overall effect. How can a poet tinker until the title alone compels? (p. 3)

The 21 poets include Finn and Stafford, also Abayomi Animashaun, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, Joe Wilkins, Shin Yu Pai, CMarie Fuhrman, Prageeta Sharma, Frank X Walker, Beth Piatote, Sean Prentiss, Shann Ray, Philip Metres, Rose McLarney, Yona Harvey, Paulann Petersen, Todd Davis, Tami Haaland, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Terry Tempest Williams.

(I had planned to offer a sampling of names, then I just kept going.) The list includes poets known to me and unknown. The approaches to revision are as diverse as the poets. They echo one another, of course—they’re writing about the same topic, after all—but each poet adds something unexpected. Not one disappoints.

As I read, I kept writing out passages in my notebook. “My revision process is, overall, one of inquiry,” Rose McLarney writes in “Identifying Gems” (p. 57). In “Finding the Language, Finding  Story” (a gorgeous essay that is also about raising a child), Joe Wilkins shares a strategy I honestly had never thought of:  “I usually write in couplets (you can’t hide anything in couplets, all that white space forces you to interrogate every word)” (p. 18).

In “Emptying the Zendo,” Shin Yu Pai admits that she doesn’t revise very much, then elaborates:

Revision, for me, is like polishing a gem to bring out its beauty. However, this working and reworking of the stone also changes its rawest qualities and alters its energy. The place where I decide to put down the pen and stop fussing with the poem is not the place another poet, teacher, or scholar might choose to end. Ultimately, we find our own relationship to our voice and our objects through reading, practice, and deep listening. In this way, we are our own teachers. —Shin Yu Pai

This might be good advice for life, as well as for writing. We find our own relationship through using our own voice, but also reading, practice, and deep listening.

For each poet, we encounter first a photo of an early draft, usually hand-written, then a typed “first” draft, next the final version, and finally a short essay about the revision. Here is Animashaun’s final draft:

Exodus

When the last immigrants
Walked out the gates

Fireworks lit up the sky
Horns and sirens blared

From every window
Flags draped

The country at last
Was itself again.

At the park, townsfolk
Celebrated new liberation day—

They cheered as foreign clothes
Were burned in piles

Danced when ethnic foods
Were flushed down sewers

And monuments to migrants
Were lassoed and pulled down

Including statues
Of the town’s founders—

Immigrants some say
From the horn of Africa—

Whose clay heads now dangle
From a rope in the heart of town.

—Abayomi Animashaun

In his essay, “Discipline and Unknowing,” Animashaun writes about the journey he took with this particular poem, and about what happens with every poem:

I never know where the writing will lead, but I accept the gift of each word, of each phrase, with the faith that each will yield in its own time as long as I continue to listen and remain steadfast . —Abayomi Animashaun

(To learn more about Animashaun and his books, visit his website: http://www.abayomianimashaun.com/books.html.)

I find myself wishing I were teaching a class where I could assign this book and discuss it. I’ll shut up now and let you find your own copy. The publisher is currently offering it at a discount: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/art-of-revising-poetry-9781350289277/.