Kooser’s Column 144
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Posted by Linda Sue Grimes Dec 31, 2007 |
Former U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser features a poem by Jackson Wheeler. About the poem Kooser writes, “I'd guess you've heard it said that the reason we laugh when somebody slips on a banana peel is that we're happy that it didn't happen to us. That kind of happiness may be shameful, but many of us have known it. In the following poem, the California poet, Jackson Wheeler, tells us of a similar experience.”
Sometimes poems sound too much like prose broken in lines. This poem suffers this flaw but nevertheless offers unique twist on its subject. The following are the first six lines of Wheeler’s “How Good Fortune Surprises Us”:
I was hauling freight
out of the Carolinas
up to the Cumberland Plateau
when, in Tennessee, I saw
from the freeway, at 2 am
a house ablaze.
To read the entire poem, please visit American Life in Poetry, column 144.
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