Imagination, Kooser, and Trump
The last line of Ted Kooser's "An Epiphany" has haunted me all week. It is the slap on the cheek to wake the reader up after the preceding gentle dreamlike lines of this rather short, deceptively simple poem have lulled the reader into a comfortable, sleepy place.
Why has this simple, direct line of poetry stayed with me, clung to me like a barnacle that I cannot shake and am not sure if I even want to? It has to do with the build up to the line, how these gentle flowing lines where Kooser imagines the life of a single strain of his wife's hair and how it came to rest in the bathtub are obliterated by that single line of harsh reality.
It shows the effect contrasting perceptions of reality and imagination can have, especially if the ratio is unbalanced like in "An Epiphany" which has imagination dominate the majority of the poem only to have reality come crashing in at the very end in the most banal yet brutal way unimagined. But what happens when imagination is not interrupted by reality, when our imagination becomes our reality and reality becomes an unwelcome intruder?
We get Donald Trump. Oh yeah, political.
"and the legs of the beetle were broken."
Why has this simple, direct line of poetry stayed with me, clung to me like a barnacle that I cannot shake and am not sure if I even want to? It has to do with the build up to the line, how these gentle flowing lines where Kooser imagines the life of a single strain of his wife's hair and how it came to rest in the bathtub are obliterated by that single line of harsh reality.
It shows the effect contrasting perceptions of reality and imagination can have, especially if the ratio is unbalanced like in "An Epiphany" which has imagination dominate the majority of the poem only to have reality come crashing in at the very end in the most banal yet brutal way unimagined. But what happens when imagination is not interrupted by reality, when our imagination becomes our reality and reality becomes an unwelcome intruder?
We get Donald Trump. Oh yeah, political.
We never know what may happen at certain points. Sometimes we become so sure that something will never happen but boom, it does happen. Our mind is very powerful and we imagine things. Sometimes things may happen by wrong will or fraud and we have to live with it because people wouldn't do anything.
ReplyDeleteDonald Trump is no way a political person. He is a fffiin Billionaire businessman who is there to do his dirty businesses. Only thing he cares about is money, he doesn't care about American people except hi sown benefit.