The People's Poet

Erik Baker, in an article on Ted Kooser quoted some of Kooser's observations that I found worth mulling over.
“Anyone in the world can write a poem that’s impossible to understand,” said Kooser. “It’s not so easy to write a poem that a lot of people can understand and will be moved by emotionally.”

Kooser’s distaste for abstract poetry comes out in his dismissal of modernism.

“I’m not a cultural critic, but I think modernism has come to serve dead ends,” said Kooser. “It has excluded an enormous audience that has been hungry for poetry. It is like a leaf spinning at the end of an alley.”

“Slam poetry may not be the greatest art, but you have to include people,” said Kooser. “When people ask me about the state of poetry, I always say it isn’t one big state. Rap poets are different from cowboy poets, and both are thriving. The only group that thinks everyone should be writing like them is the literary group.”

Yes, that's probably true, until the rap poets and cowboy poets start their own critique groups. And the part about the leaf spinning at the end of an alley-- I first thought that was a good image for the indictment of modernism, but, then again, I have to admit, there was something lyrical about the windblown paper bag in American Beauty that prevents me from totally dismissing the leaf spinning at the end of an alley as serving no aesthetic end.

The Key is to not be Emotionally Illiterate

Something particularly struck me in an article on Dannie Abse by John Horder. In June of last year, art historian Joan Abse died instantly in a horrific auto accident while returning home from a poetry reading she had given with her husband of 54 years, doctor and poet Dannie Abse. He suffered a broken rib.

Well, he suffered more than that.

Now, a difficult year later, Abse is publishing a new collection of his poems called "Running Late." In evaluating the book, Horder writes these words:
Many well-known male poets - and I have been lucky to interview a few, including Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin - are emotionally illiterate theorisers of how they would have liked their lives to have turned out.

With their huge egos, they tend to live in some detached land in their heads - too afraid to experience their mortality with their physical bodies.

Fortunately, Abse doesn't carry that kind of obstructive luggage around with him and seems to have more in common with the egoless poets Hafiz, Kabir and Rumi.

Against all the odds, he has managed to embrace his mortality without turning it into a drama.

But he does suggest that the secret of his long marriage lay in four lines by Robert Browning:

"When the apple reddens
Never pry
Lest we lose our Edens
Eve and I!"

And Abse is quoted as saying:
I don't mind melancholy poems. It's what poetry is for. I'm not interested in poets with crossword puzzle minds, like John Ashbury.

Now, I don't know that Abse's work receives the kind of intellectual admiration that Ashbury receives from the academic elite. But, as Horder writes, he is greatly loved by so many. I would say that love trumps admiration.