Kooser Column 4

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes Jul 5, 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: "None of us can fix the past. Mistakes we've made can burden us for many years, delivering their pain to the present as if they had happened just yesterday. In the following poem we join with Ruth Stone in revisiting a hurried decision, and we empathize with the intense regret of being unable to take that decision back, or any other decision, for that matter.”

The Poem

Is the speaker of the poem perhaps a bit of drama queen? Here are the first four line of “Another Feeling”:

Once you saw a drove of young pigs

crossing the highway. One of them

pulling his body by the front feet,

the hind legs dragging flat.

To read the entire poem, please visit American Life in Poetry Column 4.