Apr 29, 2008

Kooser Column 161

Kooser comments about the poem: “I may be a little sappy, but I think that almost everyone is doing the best he or she can, despite all sorts of obstacles. This poem by Jonathan Holden introduces us to a young car salesman, who is trying hard, perhaps too hard. Holden is the past poet laureate of Kansas and poet in residence at Kansas State University in Manhattan.”

The following lines are a sample from the poem “Car Showroom”:

Day after day, along with his placid

automobiles, that well-groomed

sallow young man had been waiting for

me, as in the cheerful, unchanging

weather of a billboard . . .

To read the entire poem, please go to American Life in Poetry: Column 161.

*****