I’ve been teaching poetry writing since 1981, when I began working on my Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Washington. As a teacher, I have continually applied all that I learned through trial and error creating and revising my own work and all that I learned in the company of the many great contemporary poets with whom I studied

Although I learned mines worth of lessons, I wish Ted Kooser, 13th Poet Laureate of the United States, had also been among my teachers back then. His phrases about why we write poems and the process we use in writing them pull together and sharpen my experience. “By writing poetry,” he says, “even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life.  We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay.'” I read that on page five of The Poetry Home Repair Manual and knew I would not put the book down until I had finished it. By the end of page seven, I’d read Kooser’s phrasing that poetry is about “the relationship between poet and reader” and that a poem is “the gift a poet gives an audience.”  I’d also read three more sentences that deeply affirmed what I thought once as a new poet and am now even more convinced is true:

“The aim of the poet and the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole.”

“We are thus indelibly marked by the poems we read, and the more poems we read the deeper is our knowledge of the world.”

“Though it can be a lovely experience to write a poem that pleases and delights its author, to write something that touches a reader is just about as good as it gets.”

Not only are Kooser’s words about poetry accurate and deeply memorable, when it comes to giving instructions on how to write, Kooser talks from his vast experience with patience, honesty, and practicality.  He starts by assuring us that poems don’t come from ideas but from playing with words inspired by observations of small moments and gestures.  The ideas, he says, the “reasoned assessments of the world, emerge through the poetry whether intended or not.” Kooser tell us that, “poems are triggered by catchy twists of language or little glimpses of life,” and then he tells us how to encourage those “catchy twists” in chapters on making a good first impression on the reader, not worrying about rules, working with half-rhymes and prose poems, writing about feelings without being sentimental, which robs readers of their feelings, finding your poem inside what you’ve writing, working with detail, controlling the effect on readers by making careful choices, and fine-tuning metaphors and similes.

 Kooser manages all of this instruction with folksy accessibility:  comparing a poem to a houseguest, who must be invited in (“No one is going to read your poem just because it is there”) and to chunks of ham at the grocery store appearing fresh through plastic wrap, because “What’s important, after all, is the ham cubes–that is, the words and images of the poem–not what contains them.  The form ought to fit the poem just like that shrink-wrap, and be just that transparent, so you can look right through the form to the ham.”

Kooserisms–I can’t get enough of them:

“Generally, though,…if you hold yourself back just short of what you think is gushiness, that’s enough restraint for first-draft poetry.”

“Basically, a poet can avoid sentimentality by giving the reader credit for knowing how to respond to something without being led by the nose.”

“…self-indulgent poetry almost always disappears in time… It takes a grateful audience to keep a poem alive.”

“You’ll find all sorts of dropped sunglasses on the surface of poems”  (This said after remember being a boy taking a glass-bottomed boat ride and going into trance at the sight of the water life below when all of sudden someone else’s sunglasses fell off her face, making a crashing sound that disrupted Kooser’s enthrallment.)

“A lovely elegy to your dead mother is not likely to quite as moving as it might have been if you’d not shaped the typography to look like a coffin.”

“No matter which way your poem seems to be going, it can’t hurt to get all the detail into the first draft, everything that comes to mind, every piece of silverware in the drawer, every crumb in the bottom of the cookie jar. Then you can go back and stroll through the room, like walking between overloaded tables at an estate sale.  Carry the little basket of your poem and pick up only those details that you really want to use.”

“The Chinese poets call this “lifting the eyes,” meaning that at some point the poet looks up from the triggering subject and sees (or senses) something larger.”

“A poem must be something larger than an anecdote arranged in lines.”

“The most effective poetry is not likely to be built from a sweeping look at an enormous panorama. It will more likely be found in watching a dog sniff a button.”

“Notice the value of unexpected, unpredictable detail, how it lends authenticity…”

When you read the book and start underlining what is memorable to you, I am sure you will have your own list of worthwhile nuggets.  Hanging these sayings near your desk or putting them in a jar and taking one out per day to think about as you write and revise will supply many, many important “ah ha” moments.

Although his book is not filled with exercises but with easy to follow discussion of what to admire and what to avoid in poetry writing, Kooser includes an eye-opening exercise from his classroom teaching.  He presents a poem by Lorine Niedecker with one word missing:

Popcorn-Can Cover

Popcorn-can cover
Screwed to the wall
Over a hole
So the cold
Can’t _____ in.

Then he asks the student of poetry to fill in the word with not just a verb, but also one that “amplifies” what the poem seems to be striving for.  He says typical ideas from his students include creep, squeeze, sneak, reach, seep, rush, jump and pop.  Now he asks us, think of one word that might include many of these others.  Niedecker had it:

Popcorn-Can Cover

Popcorn-can cover
Screwed to the wall
Over a hole
So the cold
Can’t mouse in.

With his lessons and straight, colorful talk, Kooser supplies needed help for aspiring poets and teachers of poetry writing and poetry reading.  The Poetry Home Repair Manual refreshes our enjoyment of poems and of drafts and revisions.  We feel good about our chosen work. Like Kooser says near the end of the book, after giving us simple publishing instructions should we want to find out if someone wants to show our poems to the world: “…relish the quiet hours at your desk, delight in the headiness of writing well and the pleasure of having done something as well as you can.”  Then he shares the poem “Night Light” by Nancy Willard that ends on just the right image for his readers, who will want nothing more than to grab their pens and begin to freshen the world:

My nine cats find their places
and go on dreaming where they left off.
My son snuggles under the heap.
His father loses his way in a book.

It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.