Valentine's Day massacre

New Criterion, June, 2008 by William Logan

Back in 1986, Ted Kooser wrote a poem for Valentine ' s Day, printed it up on a postcard, and sent it to women he knew. He did this the next year, and the next, adding a name or two, each year shipping the cards over to Valentine, Nebraska, for the postmark. After two decades of this sweet, facetious nonsense, he decided to call it quits--by then the mailing list had grown to 2,600 names and the postage exceeded the annual budget of Omaha. Valentines

collects these poems, pieced out with black-and-white drawings of farmhouses, prairie landscapes, and an alarming number of dead trees) Perhaps they ' re just waiting for spring; but it does seem odd to illustrate a book of love poems with a lot of leafless shrubbery.

Joseph Brodsky wrote a poem every year at Christmas; more poets might adopt a holiday, preferably an obscure one like Liberty Tree Day or National Mustard Day, commemorating it year by year until they have a tidy chapbook. It would keep a lot of poets out of trouble, at least until the holidays ran out. Valentines

would have made a wonderful book had the poems been any good.

If this comes creased and creased again and

soiled

as if I ' d opened it a thousand times

to see if what I ' d written here was right,

it ' s all because I looked too long for you

to put it in your pocket.

This, you can ' t help but feel, is what most people want poetry to be. A poem should be like a greeting card--with a point so blindingly obvious that reading it is like getting hit by a lead pipe. The poem should tell a little joke, perhaps shout Ba-da-boom!

, and skip off stage. If it can ' t make a joke, it should squeeze out a few cheap tears.

If you feel sorry for yourself

this Valentine ' s Day, think of

the dozens of little paper poppies

left in the box when the last

of the candy is gone, how they

must feel, dried out and brown

in their sad old heart-shaped box.

Well

, you say, as you stand around the cracker barrel, I bet them paper wrappers don ' t fed too good, now, do they?

(I ' d be sorrier for those discarded wrappings if the poet didn ' t go on to write that there ' s " not even/ one pimpled nose to root and snort/ through their delicate pot pourri. " )

Kooser must have been told that poems have musical language, because at times he tries out a jingly phrase ( " high in the chaffy, taffy-colored haze " ). He must have heard somewhere that poems use metaphors, because he tosses a few in, higgledy-piggledy: " those solemn Sunday/sacraments of Clorox in the church/ of starch, " or, considering some refrigerated celery, " Surely it misses those long fly balls of light/ its leaves once leapt to catch. " Technique doesn ' t matter much to a poet whose versified prose, sometimes beaten out on a bongo drum, is used mainly to say something whimsical or twinkly. The poems are short (they had to be short to fit on a postcard) and uplifting, though they don ' t have a lot to lift and don ' t try to lift a lot.

What ' s curious about Valentines

is how vacant and insipid the poems are. Surely a poet who sets himself up writing love poems ought to have suffered a passion or two; yet the language is as generic as a pair of blue jeans. Just when you think the poet might be making a point, he begins to gush; and then it ' s sentiment all the way down, enough to fill a lard bucket. If you want poems of thwarted love, try Hardy. If you want passion, read Donne. Valentines

is the sort of gift book you ' d buy for your sweetheart if you had no imagination but somehow knew that, on Valentine ' s Day, women like flowers, and chocolate, and . . . and poetry. Should you be too cheap for the first two, poetry would have to do.

In the House of Fame, there ' s no doubt a broom closet for Ted Kooser. If poetry can survive Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Carter, it can survive anything. Kooser lives on borrowed capital, in this case the capital accrued by Robert Frost. Frost was a complicated man, so complicated that sometimes he tried to seem simple--he contained as many multitudes as Whitman, and perhaps a few more. Most Frost imitators have tried to get away with just being simple. Frost ' s backwoods manner was too good to be true, but not too true to be good; when he said something wise, often it was

wise.

Just when I thought that Kooser didn ' t have a brain in his head, however, he surprised me. The last poem in the book, written for his wife, has all the fierce, stubborn Frost-like humor the rest of the volume lacks.

The hog-nosed snake, when playing dead,

Lets its tongue loll out of its ugly head.

It lies on its back as stiff as a stick;

If you flip it over it ' ll flip back quick.

If I seem dead when you awake,