Reading Response 5: Poetry, Kooser and Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes…” sonnet is one of his most well know and beloved sonnets. Not only is this because Shakespeare is, in the words of one of my former professors “a god-like genius”, but also because Sonnet 130 is, at its heart, a good poem. I believe this is what Ted Kooser was trying to convey in Chapter Four (‘Don’t Worry about the Rules’) of The Poetry Home Repair Manual.

Kooser makes the case that poetry should be first and foremost about substance (i.e. the point/plot/meaning) with style growing out of that substance. He gives the example of the haiku, traditionally 17 syllables, and yet that restriction does not always have to be enforced, if the resulting balance is a much stronger and more meaningful poem. He even goes so far to state that he believes along with the critic John Berger that: “Every successful sonnet is a good poem first and a good sonnet second” (Kooser 28). And this is what makes Shakespeare’s poems so enduring: people react to them first on an emotional/intuitive level before they look into the effort Shakespeare must have put in to craft the sonnet form.

Reading Response 3: Character in Kooser's "Tattoo"

In chapter three of Imaginative Writing by Janet Burroway, she writes that one of the most important characteristics a well-rounded character should have is the ability to change. After all, no one wants to read a book in which nothing happens, nor does one wish to read about a main character who is not transformed at all by his or her experiences (especially those experiences the readers share with the character). The changes, however, do not have to be dramatic in order to be effective. In fact, I think one of the most poignant passages the class had to read this week, Ted Kooser’s “Tattoo”, showed how changing a small detail—what a tattoo looks like— can effectively re-write a character and readers’ responses to said character.

Kooser begins by describing the original tattoo, a “dripping dagger held in the fist / of a shuddering heart”, something the old man had gotten years ago as a “statement” (122). Barely a sentence, and yet already parts of the man’s character already come into focus. When he was a young man, we can assume that he must have felt like he had something to prove, and so he chose a tattoo that screams of violence and death. This gives the impression that the man was a bit of a tough/gangbanger, which dovetails nicely with the next lines: “He looks like someone you had to reckon with, / strong as a stallion, fast and ornery…” (122). But over the years, the tattoo has faded into “…a bruise / on a bony old shoulder…” (122). So this tough young thug is now a worn down, thin old man, possibly on his last legs—the image of a bruise playing into the idea of illness and injury, even death. His heart “has gone soft and blue with stories,” as if all of his brashness and violence has been worn away like glass in the ocean, leaving a wistful, lonely broken being.

Where once readers might have responded with dislike towards a man who chose to wreath himself in images of violence, we now feel pity for his lost youth, and tenderness for the seemingly harmless, gentle old soul he has become. All this from one detail, one small change... one tattoo.