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.