Salter's Hare

Mary Jo Salter’s narrator in “Hare” from her recent Open Shutters muses on the fact that she and the hare she sees from her kitchen window are merely players on the stage of life, “samples of [their] species.” They are both transitory beings. She looks from the window of the house lived in only a year, and he comes at odd times, typical of his species “harum-scarum.” She first claims ownership of the “green proscenium” onto which he hops, but then reasons that she is really only the warden as he “breaks out of his warren.” She sees him to be a “hunted vagrant.”

The narrator assigns gender assuming that he is male, that he dreams “of his harem” and describes the rabbit in terms that are dominantly masculine. She assumes the warren is his and that he is “promiscuous,” noting that he “inserts himself within/ a low bush, like a lover.” Earlier, he is described as a knight on a chess board.

As a transitory image, he “leaps as fast as Aesop/ claimed his kind could leap.” When he eats he moves slowly like “a silent, smooth lawn mower,” but at other times he is compared to the jet set waiting in line at the airport. In contrast, the narrator stays “put inside the house.”

But there are other ways in which narrator and hare are similar. They are both “bad at faces” and she in her own way shares his promiscuous or mixed nature. The narrator suspects that they share a similar fate. She wonders, “will either of us be missed?” The dishes she washes are compared to “shards for the archeologist.”

When she questions whether she is seeing the same hare or a different one, she raises the whole question of individual identity, a question that lies just below the surface of the entire meditation of the poem. Life is fleeting and when it’s all said and done, is there really very much that can be said to distinguish one life from another?

Ted Kooser’s Use of Adjectives

Ellen Bryant Voigt calls for a rethinking of adjectives in The Flexible Lyric. Using Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” as an example, she makes a case for the value of adjectives, particularly in lyric poetry. She suggests that “adjectives not only annex precision and clarity, for more exact meaning, and add nuance and resonance, for evocation of emotion; in their amplifications of tone they acknowledge the poet’s subjective presence in the poem” (51). While it is a common in the consideration of contemporary poetry to question adjectives, wisdom seems to call for balance in their usage. But balance suggests a judgment call that is often difficult to make. A study of Ted Kooser’s use of adjectives in the poems in Weather Central will show just how difficult that judgment call really is.

The title poem of that volume is a good example of the resonance of well-chosen adjectives. The adjectives carry the extended metaphor that compares the delivery of the TV weather report to the grooming of a fine horse. The size and nature of the horse are conveyed by the adjectives “massive, dappled” when the narrator talks of the “flank of the continent” and “enormous Appaloosa” when the “mare of weather” is figured. In both cases, these adjectives make the figure more specific and increase the valence of the vehicle employed. The use of “cloudy” in “cloudy whorls that drift like galaxies across its hide” is both literal and figurative. On one hand the condition of the sky is denoted while on the other hand the darker patches of hair on the Appaloosa mare is connoted. Even the use of “splendid” to modify “order” increases the sense of knighthood figured in the “cavalier” bearing of the weatherman. When “horsefly’s” modifies “touch,” in the sense of “shudder running just under the skin,” the figure is given a level of specificity that would have been lost without the additional metaphorical modifier. The vibrancy of the extended trope is sufficient to carry both the heavier adjectives and the weaker concluding adjectives chosen. The dynamic of the powerful horse makes “no sudden” a necessary modifier for “moves,” and the effect of the trope allows the clichéd “peaceful moonlight” to modify “night” at the end of the poem.

In much the same way, the adjectives in “Peeling a Potato” carry the comparison with Pablo Casals. The speaker calls the potato he is peeling a “fat little cello” from which he peels “long white chords.” The adjectives in both figures function as part of the metaphor themselves and seem needed to help the reader visualize both tenor and vehicle. In the second stanza, adjectives are used sparingly with modifiers occurring only in the last two lines of the sestet. Because he is not famous like Casals, the speaker hears only “the hesitant clapping/ of a few moist hands.” In this case the adjectives “hesitant” and “few moist” carry the humor of the kitchen/amphitheater comparison.

A purist might argue that “solo” is not needed in the third stanza to modify “variations/ of J. S. Bach,” but it seems necessary to heighten the connection between the lone peeler of potatoes and the solo cellist. By the same token “tight” is needed to modify “lipped” to suggest the dual concentration of peeler and soloist. In fact, “tight” functions almost as part of a compound noun in the figure. The adjectives most open for debate in the poem are “handsome” and “old” in the final image “handsome old hands,” but here is a bid for resonance. The figure doubles back to the extended metaphor of the poem. With its juxtaposition to “inspiration,” the image recalls the Pablo Casals named in the first line. The image moves through the humor of the poem to suggest a shared dignity and life rhythm in work and in music.

“A Stoneware Crock,” a poem which uses the image of Red Wing pottery as a transitory device, is primarily a mood piece. Its dominant suggestion is that an object out of the past can evoke an immediate sense of that past or can transport its holder to the past. The scene that is evoked is dependent upon adjectives for its energy and immediacy. The reader is invited to fly on the wings of the “old five-gallon crock” to the “gray-green backwater valley of pickles.” Rich sensory images freighted with adjectives describe the scene. The poem describes its kitchens with the adjective “sugary,” and its buckets of cucumbers with “galvanized.” The smell of the cucumbers is compared in a simile to “freshly brushed hair.” Sight, taste, feel, and smell are all figured with the adjectives in the second stanza.

In the third, the adjectives “red,” “mason,” and “linoleum” bring the scene further into view visually. The comparison of the “big women” to “upright pianos” increases the sense of the movement and activity in the fourth stanza, and the “steady boil” of their gossip and the “packed jars” set to cool heightens the sense of energy in the scene. While the description could have been reduced to the nouns, the adjectives add color, warmth, and vibrancy to the scene evoked.

For the most part, Kooser seems to use adjectives in three different ways: (1) to carry the dominant metaphorical structure of the poem, (2) to bring a sense of specificity or immediacy into the descriptive narration of a poem, and (3) to express an unexpected contrast. While the first two of these patterns are used in “Weather Central,” “Peeling a Potato,” and “A Stoneware Crock,” the third pattern can be seen in “The Mouse in the Piano.”

The music the mouse plays is “new and remarkable,” and it is played in “morning darkness.” The unexpected, a technique that establishes the tension in the poem, is figured in the adjectives. The sound that a mouse makes in a piano is hardly music, but it is certainly not new or remarkable under most circumstances. The contrast in “morning darkness” is equally unexpected as is the “perfect concentration” with which the “tentative notes” and “intimate chords” are played by the mouse. Even the “hundred years” in which the music has remained secret before being released by the mouse has the unreality of its hyperbolic adjective. This technique of using adjectives that contrast with the nouns they modify or contrast with the dominant mood of the poem adds humor and causes the mind to reevaluate the circumstance being described. At the end of the poem, the speaker offers one more seeming contradiction.
the silvery strings--
a great abstraction
dumb and human—
fall all night like moonbeams
through the lifting dust.

The “silvery strings,” a metaphorical construction that describes the experience rather than the strings of the piano, have fallen through the night providing an ethereal experience for the residents of the house. The adjective “silvery” and the adjective “great” are used to heighten the sense of this experience and in so doing draw an incredible contrast between cause and effect.

Ted Kooser and the Anecdotal Poem

One of the most helpful sections of Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual may be the chapter on “Writing from Memory.” Good anecdotal poems from Kooser’s point of view must have a “distinctive and engaging speaker” (88). This speaker must control his material in such a way that he sets up a sense of suspense for the reader, and finally, the ending of the poem must cause the “anecdote to rise above itself” (84).

Kooser is particularly wary of what he calls the “ker-chunk” (88) ending or the “final heave-ho” (84), the ending that is meant “to give us the feeling that there’s a significant moment at the close” (88). Too often the “ker-chunk” ending seems contrived, the residue of the history of story-telling, and Kooser is very clear in his insistence that “A poem must be something more than an anecdote arranged in lines.” (85). The answer to avoiding the ker-chunk seems to ride on the artistry of the first two components of the anecdotal poem—the narrative voice and the control of the suspense. If the anecdote takes over the poem will be lost, but if the voice can control the shaping of the narrative, the ending can develop organically from the art.

Kooser often uses the anecdote as a focal beginning for his poems. It seems logical then to turn to his work to see how well he follows his own advice. His Weather Central offers good examples for study. One of the best examples in that volume is “A Finding.” The poem spins off of a time when the speaker’s dogs bring the leg of a deer up from the woods. The first stanza describes the situation in a straight expository style, placing emphasis on the dogs, their gnawing of the leg, and then their leaving it near the door like a gift.

The second stanza builds the personality of the speaker. In a conversational style, the speaker reaches back into his experience as a woodsman to comment on hunters who leave “gut-shot” deer to carry “an arrow for miles” before they die. The intensity of the poem picks up when the narrator speaks of finding the bones of deer where they’ve hidden, “curled themselves over their pain, and kicked at the coyotes.” The sympathy of the reader is evoked by the narrator’s recognition of the defenselessness of the animal and by the repetition of this circumstance in his experience. The last line of the stanza returns to the dogs but clearly positions the narrator in the on-going saga.

The emotion that is raised in the second stanza is modulated in the third stanza with the woodsman narrator’s careful and objective examination of the leg. With the precision of the naturalist, the narrator studies the way the leg works, its adaptation to flight. The narrator is in control of the anecdote feeding understanding of the larger issue of the negotiations between man and animal in an increasingly man-managed world.

In the final stanza, the narrator moves to the climax of the poem noting “a tiny, tar black scar from a barbed-wire fence leapt not so long ago.” This observation opens the poem to its larger burden. The deer are endangered not just by the hunters and the natural predators but also by the men who have settled the wilderness. The speaker underscores this burden with his final image. He and his two dogs look outward “over the fields.” He imagines that all three “hear that wire still thrumming.” The “final heave-ho” works because its birth has moved organically out of the narrator’s shaping of the anecdote.

“Another Story” is told totally in third person, but there is nevertheless the strong imprint of the narrator’s intelligence on the shaping of the anecdote. The narrator tells of two men silently digging a grave in a country churchyard. One finds an old cowbell and shows it to the other. They in turn handle the bell. That’s the substance of the anecdote, but the poem that goes on for eight quatrains moves beyond this basic anecdote to fasten on the bell and its imagined capacity to call forth sound beyond itself.

The cowbell when found was “covered with dirt and packed with darkness.” The finder “scraped out the dirt with his knife.” The bell had no clapper, but the finder shook it anyway. As if in response, “A meadowlark piped on a fence post,” and “a feeder thunked.” The younger man who was digging with the older held the bell “like a baby bird” and “rang it tenderly.” In response, a “crow cawed in a cedar top.” “Rang” is the narrator’s voice intruding in the poem. Because the bell had no clapper, the efforts of the two men to ring it were literally ineffectual, and it is doubtful that the diggers made any connection between their shaking of the bell and the singing of birds. The voice telling the anecdote on the other hand makes a connection.

That connection is further played out in the next stanza when the younger man shakes the bell again and “a semi trumpeted” and “an irrigation pump thumped with a regular heartbeat.” The movement of imagery from natural to mechanical pulls the sense of the poem back to the narrator’s observation in stanza three. As the men dug, the narrator tells his reader, “the grave grew slowly down/ and out of the world, and the world rolled/ under the work.” In the narrator’s mind, there is an important connection between the central act of the anecdote and the symbol of the bell.

The ending grows out of this connection. The narrator observes that the two men “touched the empty bell” throughout the afternoon as they paused in their work. Since it is doubtful that the narrator spent the whole afternoon watching the two men work, the latter observation is likely his interpretation of the pull of the bell on their consciousness. It is the capacity of this bell to move the anecdote beyond itself. On one level it carries the sense of the finite bell tolling the death of all men, and thus it renders the gravediggers silent in awe of the high and holy task in which they participate. As recovered object, it links their task more clearly to the past in the sense that any archeological find links the present to the past.

The pull of the bell on the men at the end forces the reader back into the poem to ponder the strange phenomenon of the equation between the mute bell and the external world of sound that the narrator hears. The bell becomes a reminder of sound in its multiple forms, a sense of how life is sound while death is constant quiet.

These poems differ in narrative voice in the sense that “A Finding” is told in first person with the narrator a participant in the anecdote he tells and “Another Story” is told in third person with the narrator watching the anecdote unfold from the outside. The first is seemingly more subjective than the second, but in each case there is a strong sense of voice that shapes the narrative and brings it to the kind of close that opens on a larger reality. Both poems are examples of the prescriptive notions of their author on the use of anecdote.

Hollander's Picture Window

John Hollander suggests in Melodious Guile that our perceptions of mirroring have been influenced by “the vast amount of plate glass in our lives: the larger the view, the more irrelevant mirrored image we must read through to encompass it.” Thus the modern trope for mirroring and representing has become much more complex because “reflections on transparency are not so easily to be separated.”

The title poem from his Picture Window explores this notion. The central focus of the poem is a man standing at a picture window that frames three mountain peaks. The speaker in the poem is behind the man and sees “the ever changing end-of-the-day light” on the three peaks, but realizes that the man sees only his own reflection in the plate glass. The speaker editorializes on the moment, lamenting the fact that “face to mirrored face,” the man “could only toy in the worst way with/ That splendid modern instrument of truth:/ Plateglass.”

The speaker is aware that the value of plateglass lies in the way it “superimposes mirrored / Patches of gazer's face, and bits of the/ Space out of which he looks, upon all that/ He might be seeing.” The speaker notes that the man sees through “a glass lightly, face to mirrored face.” A play on Paul's letter to the Corinthians (I Cor. 13:12), the plateglass subverts the old notion that now “we see through a glass, darkly” but when perfection comes, we will see “face to face” and shall “know” even as we are “known.”

The speaker concludes that it is better that we “see through ourselves, through our very/ Seeing itself.” The man was unable to see through himself, through his seeing. Had he been able to do that he would have been better prepared for “The indivisibility of our/ Transparency of body and the mind's/ Complicating, fragile reflectiveness.”

The picture window seems a peculiarly modern metaphor for contemporary poetry with its emphasis on the primacy of the image reflecting the intelligence of the speaker through whose eyes we see the image. While the image of the speaker is always reflected, the intent is to see through the speaker to the image itself.

Ted Kooser's Blind Woman

Ted Kooser’s “A Blind Woman” is a good poem to study personal restraint, the authorial voice subordinated to the poem’s other. The focus of the poem is clearly on the blind woman, but the imprint of the authorial voice is nevertheless visible in the way she is described.

A poem is a record of a person looking from a window outward to the world, asserts Kooser in The Poetry Home Repair Manual. The poem records the moment in the voice or presence of the speaker. To follow Kooser’s metaphor is to examine a continuum from subjectivity to objectivity depending on how the author “control[s] the amount of light outside” (31). For example, the highly subjective poem turns “down the light on the world” so that the reflection in the glass is brightened while the highly objective poem brightens the light outside so the “reflection all but disappears.” The “double image” whether faint or pronounced is the presence in the poem.

In “A Blind Woman,” Kooser shines the light directly on the movement of the woman in the first half of the poem. The description is basically expository in that she moves forward with her smiling face turned upward. She wears a sweatshirt and brown shoes, but the objectivity of the description stops there. The “double image,” the telltale signature of the authorial voice becomes apparent in the metaphorical use of light and rain in the description. The woman is said to be moving in a “rain of light” which “trickles down her forehead and into her eyes.” This “rain of light” runs into the neck of her sweatshirt, wetting the “white tops of her breasts,” and her “brown shoes splashed on/ into the light.” When the narrator of the poem moves from the objective description to applying the rain/light metaphor, he reveals his reflection in the window of the poem. That she gives herself to light like a happy child gives herself to a walk in the rain carries just a trace of the author’s attitude, his distinct vision and appreciation of the woman’s indomitable spirit.

In the last half of the poem, the “double image” of presence becomes even more pronounced with the simile chosen to counterbalance the description of the woman’s movement. The moment in time is compared to the movement of a circus wagon, the woman walking behind, the world inside. The simile heightens the sense of relished life that the narrator sees in the woman. Childlike, she is said to poke and prod the animal within the rolling cage with her cane. While the circus wagon rolls through the “puddles of light,” the world is said to have “cowered back in a corner.” The narrator renders a value judgment in his insistence in this figure that understanding comes through adversity and that ironically those on the other side of adversity may be the ones imprisoned like circus animals.

Granted the subjectivity that would have been present had the narrator stepped into the poem and told his reader exactly what the woman made him feel is not there, but the reader sees through the restraint of the “double image.” The focus is on the blind woman but the reflected presence of the narrator can also be seen in the window.