Kooser’s Column 146
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Posted by Linda Sue Grimes Aug 7, 2008 |
Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry
While serving as the U. S. Poet Laureate 2004 to 2006, Nebraska poet Ted Kooser launched his series of weekly columns called American Life in Poetry. These columns are offered free to newspapers to dramatize the value and just plain fun of poetry and to demonstrate how poetry enhances life in America.
Kooser’s Commentary
Kooser introduces the poem: “Post-traumatic stress disorder is a new name for "shell shock," a term once applied only to military veterans. Here the poet Marvin Bell describes a group of these emotionally damaged soldiers, gathered together for breakfast. I'd guess that just about everybody who reads this column has known one or two men like these.”
The Poem
Bell’s poem reads like prose broken into poetic-looking lines, one of the major traits of modern poets who are more dabblers than craftsmen.
The first five lines:
His army jacket bore the white rectangle
of one who has torn off his name. He sat mute
at the round table where the trip-wire veterans
ate breakfast. They were foxhole buddies
who went stateside without leaving the war.
To read the rest of this verse, Column 146 .
