Books in Brief
The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser (University of Nebraska Press, 192 pp., $19.95). When Nebraska's Ted Kooser was named poet laureate for the Library of Congress last fall, certain quarters of the literary establishment responded with a resounding, Huh? Poets on both coasts scratched their heads, admitting they had never heard of Kooser.
It is to be hoped they now have. With Kooser, the middle of the country and Nebraska have triumphed over the self-concerned coasts. Many of his poems involve closely observed Midwestern scenes, their artistry a way of surviving and even enjoying the world.
Though Kooser eschews the egotism of many contemporary poets, he is as distinctive a voice as any now at work, a master of metaphor and the short poem. I wonder if the impersonal office job has ever been better evoked than in his poem, "They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office":
They had torn off my face at the office. The night that I finally noticed that it was not growing back, I decided to slit my wrists. Nothing ran out; I was empty. Both of my hands fell off shortly thereafter. Now at my job they allow me to type with the stumps. It pleases them to have helped me, and I gain in speed and confidence.
Now, with The Poetry Home Repair Manual, he has written a textbook for readers of poetry and would-be poets. Or, rather, he's written a treatise of aesthetics under the guise of a textbook.
Its folksy title and appearance will no doubt baffle some of our arbiters of taste. But Kooser's book is quietly witty and iconoclastic, with valuable advice. Throwing fashion to the winds, Kooser openly admits to caring as much about readers as writers: "If you've gotten the impression from teachers or from reading contemporary poetry that poets don't need to write with a sense of somebody out there who might read what they've written, this book is not for you."
Critics will counter that populist lucidity is also a favorite of totalitarians, which is why oppressed writers often resort to surrealism or more private forms of writing to hide their meanings. But Kooser is out to rescue populism from its blunter forms, and his book is not without sophistication. One of its greatest pleasures is the range of uncanonical poets he uses as judicious examples, mixed in with better known figures. His chapter titles alone indicate much of his approach: "A Poet's Job Description," "Writing for Others," "First Impressions," "Don't Worry About the Rules."
Actually, it's in that "Don't Worry About the Rules" chapter that I felt my hackles rise a little. Kooser slights the subject of meter as if afraid of sounding like the smart kid in class, and he admits poets who want a grounding
in that subject will have to look elsewhere.
Chapters on "Working With Detail," "Controlling Effects," and "Fine Tuning Metaphors and Similes" show Kooser at his best. He presents a whole stance toward writing in the context of living one's life. The Poetry Home Repair Manual is brief, lucid, and often remarkably wise.
--David Mason
Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court's Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice by Kevin A. Ring (Regnery, 256 pp., $27.95). According to former Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, "Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind."
One justice who has always understood this is Antonin Scalia, as nearly everyone knows. But what isn't as well known is that Scalia is also funny--and prone to stating his views in the sharpest, cleverest way. Some of his witty writing can now be read in Kevin Ring's new Scalia Dissents, which contains over a dozen of the justice's opinions.
As Ring explains, for Scalia, when it comes to interpreting the Constitution, "judges should focus on the text" and "courts must make certain that there is specific textual support for each assertion." Scalia, who joined the Court in 1986, has fought tirelessly to insist that justices cannot impose their own meaning on the Constitution or infer the intended meaning of the Founding Fathers. Instead, he "searches for 'original meaning,' which he defines as the original understanding of the text at the time it was drafted and ratified." His originalism is in stark contrast to that of justices who embrace a philosophy of "original intent," which enables judicial activists to reinvent the Founders' purposes.
Ring's pithy epilogue condemns the judicial activism prevalent in the Supreme Court. According to Ring, true democracy will only be achieved when justices no longer impose their values on the Constitution and stop catering to special-interest groups. In response to the speculation over Chief Justice William Rehnquist's failing health and expected retirement, Ring recently wrote in the Washington Times that Scalia would be "the obvious choice" to succeed him. If this were the case, under Scalia, "the core freedoms [that] had been weakened by recent Court decisions would be restored to their original meaning and protected against the shifting winds of public opinion."
--Loredana Vuoto
The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle edited by Kathleen Flake (University of North Carolina Press, 238 pp., $18.95). The Mormon Church--or, rather, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints--is the largest religious denomination founded on American soil. Following its inception in the early nineteenth century, it was subjected to such extreme localized persecution that it eventually migrated in stages west, arriving in present Utah in 1847 and founding Salt Lake City under the guidance of its second prophet, Brigham Young.
The early persecutions of the Mormons were in part a reaction to doctrines and rituals viewed as peculiar by the dominant Protestant denominations of the time: Polygamy, for instance, and "Blood Atonement," where apostates were ritually executed by beheading. The Church also had some historical black marks, most notably the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, where a besieged and paranoid Brigham Young ordered an attack on a "gentile" wagon train that resulted in over a hundred deaths.
All this imprinted on the American mind the view that Utah was a bizarre and homicidal theocracy. But in the end, Americans mostly identified Mormons with polygamy, a practice the church officially banned as a condition for Utah's gaining of statehood in 1896.
In 1902, Reed Smoot, a forty-one-year-old "apostle"--meaning not just a believer, but an official in the church hierarchy--was elected to one of Utah's seats in the U.S. Senate, and a nationwide controversy erupted. Editorial pages attacked him personally and Mormons in general. Open season was declared in the vicious newspaper political cartooning prevalent at the time--one cartoonist portrayed Smoot as a puppet being manipulated by a sinister-looking man labeled "Mormon Hierarchy."
The question was whether Smoot's loyalties would lie with church or state. A nationwide petition against his seating garnered three million signatures. A four-year Senate investigation over the question of whether Smoot could take his seat eventually produced 3,500 pages of testimony, putting before the public all aspects of Mormonism, including its secret rituals.
All this is chronicled in The Politics of American Religious Identity by Kathleen Flake, a religious scholar at Vanderbilt University. President Theodore Roosevelt's role in the affair is interesting, and Flake covers it in detail. Roosevelt was initially "against the election of any [Mormon] apostle to the United States Senatorship." But the long Senate proceeding irritated him, and he urged that the matter be brought to a conclusion. He later came to like Smoot and his wife Alpha, and--for the benefit of the press--made a point of socializing with them at a 1907 Washington reception.
Smoot's greatest defender was Joseph F. Smith, a nephew of the legendary founder of the church. Smith's Senate testimony was instrumental in aiding Smoot's case. The Mormon elder eloquently explained the church's repudiation of polygamy and other controversial doctrines, ending by quoting from the church canon: "Let no man break the laws of the land, for he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land." Smith's testimony was learned in its way and well received by the Senate.
A lively floor debate ensued on February 6, 1907, with the public and the press packing the Senate's galleries. In the end, it was a case of whether the Mormons met the constitutional criteria "on the same denominational terms as other American religions: obedience, loyalty and tolerance defined in political, not religious terms." Thus began the Mormon church's slow integration into the American religious mainstream. Reed Smoot was seated and began an illustrious career. For good or ill, he is the "Smoot" of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, legislation that may have actually worsened the Great Depression.
Kathleen Flake's The Politics of American Religious Identity is a good start for readers interested in the structure of modern American church-state relations, especially in light of our current national Babel of sectarian voices large and small.
Bill Croke