“That Was I,”
In his self-portrait poem, “That Was I,” poet laureate Ted Kooser demonstrates the witness of the poet—in part by minimizing his own importance.
Kooser presents himself from the perspective of his audience. In the first stanza, Kooser is “that older man you saw sitting in a confetti of yellow light,” visiting an empty horseshoe lot. Then he is the “round-shouldered man you saw that afternoon,” contemplating an abandoned Mini-Golf. Likewise, Kooser presents himself at a distance, under observation, in the final stanza:
And that was I you spotted that evening
just before dark, in a weedy cemetery
west of Staplehurst, down on one knee
as if trying to make out the name on a stone,
some lonely old man, you thought, come there
to pity himself in the reliable sadness
of grass among graves, but that was not so.
Instead I had found in its perfect web
a handsome black and yellow spider
pumping its legs to try to shake my footing
as if I were a gift, an enormous moth
that it could snare and eat. Yes, that was I.
The framing device of being “spotted” in three different scenes—horseshoes, Mini-Golf, graveyard—makes the reader aware of his or her own status as an observer. The three scenes are cumulative, bound together by the refrain “yes, that was I.” But we can also read each scene as presenting a different character: “that older man,” “the round-shouldered man,” and finally “some lonely old man”—each “spotted” by chance, none seeking attention. The poet is no grand figure, not even everyman, but only any old man.
By narrowing our attention on the spider, Kooser draws our attention away from himself—a curious thing for a self-portrait to do.
With each description of the spider, Kooser surprises. We are perhaps not disposed to consider the spider “handsome” and we are amused at this effort to “shake [the poet’s] footing.” Then the “enormous moth” lends visual humor to the poem’s most interesting (also surprising) concept: the “gift.”
Kooser becomes the “gift” by pointing us away from himself, showing instead the strange beauty of the spider against the solemn graveyard. The poet’s final declaration “that was I” blurs, rather than affirms, the poetic ego. Clearly “I” links the scene in the present stanza to the previous two. But who is the “I” of the present scene? Intuitively we imagine “I” to be “the man you spotted” at the stanza’s outset, but more humorously it could be the “enormous moth.” Kooser might even be saying “I was the spider!” Or we can consider the poet all of these things, a participant in the whole poetic moment, the “gift.”
I return to Kooser because of all the poets I have encountered, he is most enduringly a giver. I ordered my copy of Delights and Shadows used online for $3.80. When I opened the cover to the title page, I found, in a confident but cramped hand: Ted Kooser. The collection was, after all, a gift.
[The following poems have been selected to reflect the witness of the poet as giver, the poem as a gift...]
