Published: April 25, 2009 09:55 pm      

On Poetry: Keeping readers awake

This is the final column for National Poetry Month, and I'm thinking, who's the ideal reader for a poem? Who would I pick for my own poems? Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate, is onto something here. Notice that he's a little in love with his reader — she's beautiful, and just out of the bath. And it's a lonely time of day, plus, she's poor — all the better to seduce her into the poems.

He almost has her, but then she gets practical on him. She spends the money getting her raincoat cleaned instead of buying his book. Why, then, is she the ideal reader? I'd say because she's both drawn to the poems and has her feet on the ground. She's not easily seduced. She'll require a poem to be a part of her real world, not self-absorbed, not floating off in abstractions that won't help her live her life.

I once gave a reading with fellow poet Sydney Lea at the Horse Meadow Senior Center in New Hampshire. We were told to get started before the residents had finished their lunch, during dessert, or else they'd wander off to take a nap. We joked about it, but we both vowed that the poems we wanted to write in our lives would always be ones that, at least on some level, the folks at the Horse Meadow Senior Center would stay awake for. No matter how complex the ideas in the poem, no matter how difficult some of the language might be, there would always be the recognizable real world in it, and real people who could always choose to get their raincoats cleaned instead.

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat leaned." And she will.

-- Ted Kooser

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware.