Craftsman at work …

… “Seventy Years Ago”: A Review of Red Stilts by Ted Kooser. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Kooser, like Williams, is integral to it. He is not a genius but a craftsman — think of Williams’ provocative statement that a poem is “a machine made out of words.” A Kooser poem is a dispatch from small-town America. Flyover country. For him, as it should be for us, a man standing at a bulletin board outside of the grocery store is worth documenting.