Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring 1999, pp. 97-106.
Abstract
"Etude," which launches Weather Central, Ted Kooser's most recent full-length collection of poems, is in many ways typical of the poet's work. The poem is what it professes to be: an etude, a study, a preview of all the poems that are to follow. It also defines the major poetic devices or characteristics that will be important throughout the 1994 volume: direct, plain-spoken language; use of interior and exterior landscape{s); and explicit metaphor that particularizes the poet's life.
Many of us who make our home on the plains recognize the Great Blue Heron in the cattails, the bubbles along the water's surface, the blue suit of the everyday job. The poet's guiding metaphor, Great Blue Heron/loverartist, is one we can appreciate, perhaps even participate in, as the bird eases ahead in our memory as well as on the printed page before us.
That Kooser's poetry is frequently classified as regional comes as no surprise. Critics throughout the poet's career have pointed to his phenomenology of the plains in and around Lincoln, Nebraska, where he has lived since 1963. Kooser's work, according to Peter Stitt, "grows directly out of the life he leads as a more or less average citizen of a more or less average small city set nearly at the center of the United States." David Baker, reviewing for Poetry, sees Weather Central as part of Kooser's "larger project, the creation in poetry of a distinctly Midwestern social text."
Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Kooser's roots are in the Midwest. He received his B.S. in English education from Iowa State University and then moved to the Lincoln area to work on his M.A. in English, which he received from the University of Nebraska in 1968. Although he has taught poetry writing from time to time and has managed his own press for many years, Kooser has earned his living in a nonacademic, nonliterary environment. Only this year has Kooser retired from Lincoln Benefit Life Company, where he was vice president of marketing.
In his close attention to plains life, Kooser can be placed within the tradition of William Carlos Williams. However, Kooser, like Williams before him, suggests that although art is rooted in the local, it need not remain only there. Indeed, Kooser's preoccupation is with mutuality: both the particular and the universal are among his central poetic concerns. As we shall see, an understanding of the way Kooser makes mutuality manifest is crucial to the explication of his poetry. This in turn will lead us to a fuller appreciation of the scope of Kooser's work and to a reassessment of his place among contemporary American writers.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln