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Of the grand success of This Side of Paradise, his first novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald confessed, "Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again."
I can't imagine the poet Ted Kooser ever doing such a thing, and not because he's unfamiliar with the lofty summits of success. The same week his selection as our nation's poet laureate was announced, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Delights & Shadows. Who can top that for a banner week?
No, I can't imagine him bawling in a cab over fleeting fame — first, because he has said he had never expected to be notable, outside small literary circles, and more important, because I believe him to be the least narcissistic author on the planet. And here lies (for my money) Ted Kooser's most important lesson about writing and about living. He makes it his business to treat his readers with respect, even honor.
He'll tell you it wasn't always so. In a book from which I have learned much, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser confesses: "I've inadvertently written lots of poems that meant nothing to anybody else, and I've mailed those poems to editors from coast to coast, hoping that they would be published, only to realize when they were rejected that I'd written them just for myself. … You choose what to write and how to write it, but if you want to earn an audience for your work, you need to think about the interests, expectations and needs of others, as well as how you present yourself to them."
He recommends making literal that idea of an audience. "If you keep the shadow of that reader — like a whiff of perfume — in the room where you write, you'll be a better writer."
Ted Kooser writes about family, barn animals, bats and mystified chickens. His colors come from middle America — dishwater is one of them.
His writing is known for its clarity, precision and accessibility, but his accessibility isn't at all about pandering for an audience. No, it's about his respect for his readers. All of them.
Ted Kooser is, above all, a friendly poet. There are no ambushes in his poems. It's like sitting on the porch and being read to by a kindly uncle. Arguing against poets with angry agendas, Kooser has said, "Being harangued by a poet rarely endears a reader." There you go.
And here is what he has said about his own accessibility.
"I would like to show average people, with a high-school education or just a couple years of college, that they can understand poems. They are not to be afraid or feel they are being tricked by them. I'm trying to do that by example."
He comes from the William Carlos Williams "no ideas but in things" school of writing. Remember "the red wheelbarrow glazed with rain" poem you read in high school? Listen to this echo from Kooser:
A young woman in a wheelchair
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays this difficult music she has mastered,
Her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
While the wind turns the pages of rain.
— "A Rainy Morning" from Delights & Shadows
Yes, we all have seen how pianists bend forward, attacking a score, a piano, but it takes a deft poet like Ted Kooser to show us what we have seen move along urban streets all our lives without even knowing it. But that's what poetry, at its best, always does. It opens our eyes.
Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Wasatch Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City.