Is There an Antidote for the Anecdote Poem?

poetry manual

“Perhaps poetry in recent years has grown too weak to resist the attractive, familiar, conversational, seductive anecdote, too eyesore for trying to describe actions, too weary of meditation and contemplation, too jaded by trying to present deeper poems to a largely indifferent audience.”
– Ted Kooser in The Poetry Home Repair Manual (Nebraska, 2005)

While I value Kooser’s handbook and often use it with students, I’m troubled by his discussion, which occupies ten of the book’s 158 pages, of the anecdote-as-poem. My dismay even surprises me a little, because when he offers at the end of the “Writing from Memory” chapter his antidote to the anecdote poem (“Think about the speaker’s characteristic voice, the syntax, the rhythm, the form, the selection of details. The story itself is merely the material.)” I pretty much agree, but I would add something about the imagination and not allowing the sparking anecdote’s autobiographical facts to limit the poem’s options. And I don’t agree that the anecdote is “merely the material.” Can’t it also be the springboard, the seed, maybe the inspiration?

It’s possible that Kooser means that, too, but his ten pages don’t suggest that one anecdote or several may be at the necessary heart of many poems we call narratives. In fact, the poem he presents and praises highly as the anti-anecdote is Henry Taylor’s splendid “The Hayfork” (originally published in Shenandoah) a rumination about an anecdote about a brief event, whether imagined or recorded or some complex combination. Taylor’s poem shines from his lapidary attention to “characteristic voice,” “form” and “detail.” It is a seed carefully sown, nourished, sunlit, watered, its stalk, stem, leaf and fruit all tended to, a meticulous and crafty process that most anecdotes do require to transform them into poems. In fact, episodes or memories often require at least a little of that shaping before they can even become successful anecdotes, so probably what Kooser and I disagree about is the degree of likelihood that an anecdote can be cultivated into an intricate and artful poem. My position is that we shouldn’t blame anecdotes but get right to the culprit and call out the poets, who are not willing to work the original material the way Bill Monroe told a young Ricky Skaggs you can get a mandolin to render bluegrass music: “Son, you got to whip it like a mule.”

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If I’m being hard on Kooser for his claim that 90 of 100 poems in literary journals are “mere material” recorded literally in raw form, it’s because I do have a dog in this fight. Plenty of my favorite narrative poems – whether personal or historical, ruminative or dramatic – are born of anecdotes. Not The Odyssey, of course, but Taylor’s poem, “Traveling through the Dark,” some of Kooser’s own poems and the poem of mine he reprints in another chapter to make a point about openings. (“Hardware Sparrows,” in fact, begins in what Kooser calls “anecdotal manner,” which has to be transcended, but also has a role to play). I do love narrative, so I’d argue that instead of warning writers away from anecdotes (which are often tame and amusing), I’d encourage poets to collect them and accept the challenge to discover which ones may render something richer and more ambitious, to give them the attention C. Bronte said went into her sister’s making Wuthering Heights, which was “hewn in a wild workshop.”

“Future readers,” Kooser speculates, “may likely conclude that most of our own poets were attempting to elevate the everyday personal anecdote to acceptability as a work of art,” and sometime when I see the one-page anecdote with flaccid cadence, hackneyed figures of speech, imprecise descriptions, mini wow at the end and so on, I fear that’s the case, that they’re trying to show that poetry is already inherent all things and that all utterances may be considered poems. Anybody can do it, almost by accident. But mostly I think some writers are lazy or unskilled, which is what my own failures (more frequent than I like to think about) often imply because I just didn’t bring, couldn’t access, my A game. I haven’t stared hard enough, dug deep enough, imagined fiercely enough, and the problem is not that I’ve produced an anecdote poem but that I’ve made a crappy poem, a result I can wind up with just as easily when anecdote isn’t part of the equation.

Kooser continues by suggesting that these anecdoters (or anecpos?) are “amusing each other with the warm and comfortable crossroads of the literary quarterly.” As if this were a team effort to dumb it all down so the ambitious and deft poets will have to yield ground (and pages in magazines, books, websites) to cheapjack, slipshod, unhoned, unhewn poems. Then our reading matter will be supplied by “poems in which some personal story has fleshed itself [?] out in the guise of a poem and demonstrates no aspiration to be anything greater.”

Instead of offering a real, live awful anecdote poem as an example, Kooser – maybe out of tact, maybe out of uncertainty how to acquire rights to reprint a poem just to say “bad dog” to it – creates a hypothetical that’s just a thin puppet non-poem. The one he makes is really (intentionally) skunky and closes, in an attempt at profundity, on the single word last line “ker-chunk!” meant to suggest a zinger which will resonate dramatically. When he makes a brisk 15-line chopped prose specimen to show what Taylor’s poem might have looked like in the hands of an anecpo, he uses that “ker-chunk!” at the end to signify a hayfork falling from its elevated track and stabbing the ground right in front of an unwary worker. Maybe Kooser isn’t being quite fair to the anecpos who are trying to tell a story but don’t know how to give it muscle and force. Taylor’s poem is sixty lines long, none of them as brief or tone-deaf as the puppet anecdote, so the comparison seems less instructive than it might have been. Compare Stafford’s encounter on the Wilson River road to a mere dead animal anecdote of about the same length and framework and the point might be clearer.

poetry lettersMaybe Kooser and I don’t disagree so much about the nature of these masquerading anecdotes as differ on what should be done with them. He suggests (though perhaps tongue-in-cheek) creating a new genre outside poetry for these anecritters, and he thinks that if creative non-fiction can become part of the canon, the anecdote can be canonized too, though he doesn’t nominate any particular examples or actual (not lined out like poems) anecdotes to sit beside, though in a separate box, other kinds of poems like “Upon Julia’s Clothes” or “The Woodpile,” a couple of real poems which a perverse wizard could quickly thin out, dessicate and anecdoodlize.

I’m not so concerned that our era will look like the era of the anecdote as that it will look like the era of poem as riddle, as political oath, sensitivity documentation, blur of impressions, far-fetched associational lyrics, critical theory exercise, or what Jahan Ramazani has called in a Norton anthology note “incongruous equations in metaphor,” as I often find in poems with names at the bottom like Ashbery, Graham, Carson, Brock-Broido, all of whom have, admittedly, written some moving and provocative poems.

Fred Chappell, who shared the 1985 Bollingen Prize with John Ashbery, often writes narrative poems – about cleaning a well, burning a church, plinking empty whisky bottles or receiving wisdom from an elder – fully leafed and flowered stories which readers can, if so inclined, whittle back and imagine – once the language is neutered, character sapped, description made ordinary – the anecdote that may have been the first flash of memory or imagination, which Chappell then had to put his mind and heart to, savoring the labor.

If a lot of the anecdoters were shown what might be done to breathe life into their limp (or even snappy or shocking) raw anecdotes, as writers like Rodney Jones, Kay Byer, Brendan Galvin, Rita Dove, Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Wrigley do, they might give up at the prospect of so much toil before them, or they might start thinking about how to enrich the soil, stake the stalk, sucker the leaves. I catch myself using gardening terms while really thinking more about childrearing. The anecdotes need to be raised up with much attention and skill and not just sent as toddlers into the world to do the work of men and women.

I suppose I’ve come around to agreeing with Kooser about a particular serious deficiency in much contemporary poetry, but my take on how to treat it is a little different. And by the way, if writers bear much of the burden for this deficiency, editors must shoulder a significant portion as well. Shame on us. We need to hold out for more passion (as Merwin remembers Berryman telling him in “Berryman”), though that doesn’t mean it has to be explicit. Human heat and craft will help. If we need a mantra, maybe it’s as simple as this: “Son, you got to whip it like a mule.”


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.