Review: Ted Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005)

In reviewing this 163-page book, I expected to see poetry with part numbers – something like the Sears Manual to its LP-20 washing machine. Or a taxonomy of rhymes and rhythms. Happily, I was disappointed in both expectations.

The new U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, Ted Kooser dispels the idea of poetry as an elite medium. “A lot of the resistance to poetry can be blamed on poets,” he says, reminding me that a similar sentence could be constructed to blame low opera attendance on Wagner. Now this comparison is probably unfair, but is does have some traction.

But bear with me, if you will. Here’s a better quote: “A poem is the invited guest of its reader.” Now this can become controversial, because there are those that might feel the poet is in charge, regardless. Kooser would rather bring the reader into the equation.

It gets more interesting with this quotation: “Give those titles and openings a cost-benefit analysis: How much do you gain by using the beginning you’ve written, versus how much might it cost you by putting off the reader?” The economics of poetry. But Kooser isn’t all wrong.

Kooser gets into the idea of audience building and making poetry more readily understandable for readers, for example by using contemporary speech. “Don’t Worry about Rules” (the title of Chapter 4) is the order of the day.

Kooser also gives us important warnings, such as the avoidance of self-indulgence and sentimentality, which often forms a barrier between good and bad in this area of expression. (After all, many “Roses are red, violets are blue… “ poets feel that sentimentality and self-indulgence is the stuff of good poetry.)

Here a poet laureate gets down to earth and helps “the rest of us” learn how to apply our imagination in this unique form of expression. “Most of the poets I know are of average intelligence,” he says. “What makes them ‘different’ is that they love playing with language.” We can all be different that way, he seems to be saying, and the poetic profession is closed to none.

I recommend this “Home Repair Manual” for poets and students of poetry. There’s something there for all of us and it’s far better reading than that Sears Manual I was thinking about.

When I was first asked to write a short piece of writing memoir or biography, I that it a bit strange I would be asked to write something when the only other things I have written were stories based on my life – so far. However, I do have a manuscript, a very long manuscript, so I would suppose I am qualified to tell you what I learned along the way of writing ‘that great American memoir’.

When I first made up my mind to put my writing where my mouth is, and quit talking about what I would do, a very good friend advised me by saying, ‘Diane, just down and write. Start with the first day you met, and take it from there.” I had no idea our brief 4 ½ years were worthy of an entire manuscript, and hopefully a book or a TV miniseries. Ah! I do dream!

So, I followed my friends advice and I began to write, and I wrote and I wrote, and I wrote, for 8 hours straight I told the story of the most remarkable young man I would ever meet, and how he fell in love with me. I wrote about the first date, and I wrote about how we fell so much in love we could not even study… and then I had a dilemma – so I tell the truth now, or would I change our story to a version sanitized of all our human failures. With the idea of our children someday reading my words, and our deeds, I decided to ‘nice’ it over. As I wrote the fiction, I continued to have difficulties making the ends meet, once I told that first ‘lie’, nothing fit, and unknown to me at the time, I learned my first great lesson about how to write memoir.

Now, after all the years of writing, editing, and re-writing, the truth is the truth. It is the shortcut to the final chapters simply because I did not have to go back and see what I had said, and when. I did not have to maneuver script simply write.

Once, when I was a child, my grandmother told me, “Diane, if you tell the truth, you never have to remember what you said.”

Oh how right she was!

My finished manuscript is over 1000 pages, one side, double spaced, but still a huge piece of work, and not one single word is a lie, an embellishment, although I left my heart on every page. However, over time, IF I ever published, I KNOW that no one can say, “It didn’t happen that way.” Perhaps, they will think they remember it differently, but it was my life, I lived it, and I KNOW what happened, what happened, what was said, how, and why.

So, if you want to write memoir, tell the truth from the very beginning, check your resources about memories that might have become fuzzy, and ask others what they remember. I sure had to do that for the funeral because I was not there, rather floating overhead watching this person who was supposed to be me, do and say all the right things. I cannot give any other advice, each of us has to live with what we write and for some, and the truth may be too painful. There were times when I did not think I could finish our story, but I did, and I cried more tears than I have in my lifetime.

If you want to write memoir, tell it like it happened, tears and all, if not, write fiction, usually it makes for a more interesting story. I simply do not know how to write other than my own heartaches.

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