One of my favorite papers I wrote in college came out of an assignment to compare Kooser's “The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise” and Linda Pastan’s “after minor surgery”--a comparison which does the Pastan poem no favors.
Kooser's poem, though, is a wonderful piece of writing. I think Gioia goes into it at length in his book of essays. Fine work.
Edited to note: I think that the "come as such a surprise" phrase is a key one in considering Kooser's work. He's a poet with a knack for surprises, the startling image or connection. I'm not sure there's any better knack that a writer can have. Readers love to "expect the unexpected."
--CS
P.S. And here's the poem . . . as a critic, I'm not sure that I wholly swallow Gioia's assertion that a critic cannot "meaningfully add to the attentive reader's appreciation of this poem" . . . but then, as a critic, I'm biased.
There sure is a lot in this one, though.
The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise
The blind always come as such a surprise,
suddenly filling an elevator
with a great white porcupine of canes,
or coming down upon us in a noisy crowd
like the eye of a hurricane.
The dashboards of cars stopped at crosswalks
and the shoes of commuters on trains
are covered with sentences
struck down in mid-flight by the canes of the blind.
Each of them changes our lives,
tapping across the bright circles of our ambitions
like cracks traversing the favorite china.
[This message has been edited by Clay Stockton (edited July 08, 2004).]
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