Ted Kooser, "An Epiphany"

I've mentioned epiphany a few times. Is Kooser right in thinking that's what's happening in his spider scene?

An Epiphany by Ted Kooser : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Given Kooser’s talky voice, we might overlook his flirtation with rhyme. Now we have it, now we don’t. But with or without exact rhyme, we have the “r” and “l” sounds.

And rather than tie up everything—neatly and over-resolved—in the end, Kooser plays with those “r” sounds, ending on “finger” and “broken.” We can’t ignore the “r,” given the accumulation of the sound, but he slyly refuses to give us an exact rhyme, which would imply balance, order, peace, law, and justice as a conclusion, when in fact things are broken and the “me” is left alone at the end of a line, with no rhyming partner.

If there is an epiphany here, surely it has to do with “broken” things, and the speaker is alone with his understanding of that.


In the video below, the deer biz might be apropros of nothing, but I found it curiously interesting, understated, amusing, touching. Then, rather than re-running the Bambi pic, I figured some bison in the rain, near Corydon, Indiana, might be more interesting. I wonder if the restaurant makes them nervous.

That, in turn, has made me wonder if there's a thread here after all: spiders eat, bison eat, people eat. Everybody eats. Even Bambi. Welcome to Banjo Brain.

YouTube - Deer Calling Tips: Trail Grunt Sequence



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