I’m pretty sure that Paul Muldoon, of whom we spoke recently, felt the influence of his fellow Irish emigré Louis MacNeice, at least as a subterranean tremor. I find this reassuring, since my admiration for MacNeice sometimes puts me in a reactionary camp whose writers still read George Herbert and savor the occasional rhyme or seemingly wrung-out form.
Today we have another living writer: Nebraskan Ted Kooser, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Although I haven’t encountered any formal endorsement by Kooser of his influences, it seems clear to me that he is a student of Louis MacNeice in the broadest sense. His verses—the few I’ve read so far—are endowed with yearnings untouched by sentimentality, a clarity driven by paradox, and a tacit acknowledgement of iambic pentameter that, while it hardly adheres to old forms, pays attention to rhythm in a way that MacNeice (and Muldoon) do, and skillfully.
The American Academy of Poets, in their poem-a-day share, published Kooser’s “Legacy” today:
I have spent seventy years trying to persuade you, to manipulate you with the poems I’ve written, to remember my people as if they’d been yours— to flesh out in evocative detail my parents, my grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts— knowing that one day I’ll be gone, and without me to remember them, the poems I’ve written will have to go it alone. I owe my people so much, and I want them to enjoy—if not immortality—a few more good years in the light, my grandfather patching a tire for a quarter, his brother weaving a rag rug on his sun porch, my mother at her humming sewing machine, my father un-thumping a bolt of brocade, measuring for new draperies. Perhaps they were for you, to draw open and see on your lawn Cousin Eunice Morarend playing her accordion.
“Brocade” is one of those terrific words somewhat fallen out of fashion, one that reminds me of Emily Dickinson.
But who is the “you” here? At first I assumed it was a spouse or companion, but the more I let the work settle the more probable it seems to me that he’s addressing his reader, talking to me. It’s the obverse of Dickinson’s insistence that “when I speak of myself as the representative of the verse, I do mean me but a supposed person.” (Forgive me, I quote from memory—a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, I think.)
Kooser admits that, in his long career versifying, he’s been trying to manipulate me all along, even well before I was born. He was speaking to a person he’d never meet, a coastal suburbanite repeatedly reinventing himself and foolishly attached to the life of the mind. His sharply drawn sequence of images from childhood and youth in middle America instantly evoke lost time, and a quirky, idiosyncratic, affectionate bunch of relatives, almost Southern but without the incest.
I realize you may argue with me about the absence of sentimentality, but in any case I think the whole poem is a memento mori.