American Life in Poetry: Column 072

By Ted Kooser,
U.S. poet laureate, 2004-2006
Those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s have a tough, no-nonsense take on what work is. If when I was young I’d told my father I was looking for fulfilling work, he would have looked at me as if I’d just arrived from Mars. Here the
Pennsylvania poet, Jan Beatty, takes on the voice of her father to illustrate the
thinking of a generation of Americans.

My Father Teaches Me to Dream

You want to know what work is?
I’ll tell you what work is:
Work is work.
You get up. You get on the bus.
You don’t look from side to side.
You keep your eyes straight ahead.
That way nobody bothers you–see?
You get off the bus. You work all day.
You get back on the bus at night. Same thing.
You go to sleep. You get up.
You do the same thing again.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
There’s no handouts in this life.
All this other stuff you’re looking for–
it ain’t there.
Work is work.

First printed in “Witness,” Volume 10, Number 2, and reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 1996 by Jan Beatty, whose latest book, “Boneshaker,” was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2002. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.“

American Life in Poetry: Column 070

By Ted Kooser,
U.S. poet laureate, 2004-2006
As a man I’ll never gain the wisdom Sharon Olds expresses in this poem about motherhood, but one of the reasons poetry is essential is that it can take us so far into someone else’s experience that we feel it’s our own.

My Son the Man

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

“My Son the Man” from THE WELLSPRING by Sharon Olds. Copyright (c) 1996 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.