Kooser
Let's workshop this poem about an imagination-withering insularity-emboldening impact of the heartland-poetics rule that poets should narrate from the first-person only if the events happened to him
scent of the day: Ambre Sultan, by Serge Lutens. Still one of the most celebrated curl-up-with-a-book ambers ever created, this wildly balsamic fragrance from 1993 moves seamlessly between sweet-warm-smoky-herbal-medicinal tones and transports me to the cozy evergreen forest home of some fairytale grandmother as she digs through her spice cabinet for more elements to toss into her autumnal potpourri: sandalwood chips, cinnamon sticks, twinned bundles of vanilla and patchouli sprigs all glugging away in a cast-iron cauldron of smokey myrrh, caramelic opoponax, creamy benzoin, and leathery labdanum melted to near molasses consistency—a dark-golden syrup, almost chewy, that never gets cloying given the heavy dose of desiccated herbs and spices pestled into a sweetness-muting mélange in her mortar: nutmeg, all-spice, clove, more cinnamon, and even medicinal bay leaf, citrusy coriander, peppery oregano, musky angelica, and green-aromatic myrtle that balance out the extreme density we see in more streamlined ambers that lack such uplifting elements (for example, Profumum Roma’s more richer and opulent amber: Ambra Aurea),
Kooser*
The corn-belt poet called it
wrong to use the “I” for what
never happened to the “I”—
and so, in saving readers
from wasting emotions like pity
on underserving poets, built
(as if some parochialism shill)
laureate walls along a sure route
to the deepest empathy.
* The rule of poetics here that the poem criticizes seems to go hand in hand with our white-authors-can-only-write-white-characters recidivistic and insular and lonely era where trauma must be time-stamped and notarized before it can speak through us.
