Benjamin Vineyard

Nothing beats a good poem. A good poem causes something to happen inside that the author probably never saw coming. Pictures come up, memories too, of things the author never saw, never thought of. Good or bad, things start to come up – you start to see the inner workings of life itself as it unfolds in your memory and imagination. It’s something close to the seeds of eternal life sprouting, I think.

Ted Kooser has been my favorite poet, and really, one of the only poets I’ve read. I’ve stuck with his writing because of the sheer simplicity of the things he writes about – life in simple towns, simple situations, and the beauty that is just explosive inside of such small things.

So what is it about poetry that made me write a blog post? It’s the life that’s in the words. I think too many of us assume all poetry is like Emily Dickinson’s marching rhymes, which are quaint and beautiful really, but when that’s all we’ve heard, we get burned out on it. For me, when I sit down with a Kooser collection, I pick up something much more than words, much more than a fad – I pick up a picture beyond 20,000 words. I pick up a story that I could spend three hours living into and only took Kooser 12 lines to write.

There’s just something in the words, something that takes me to a place that just captures all of who I am and places me into the moment of the experience. Life, I suppose, is what we call this.