Swallowing the Soap: New and Selected Poems (review)

In some ways, reading Swallowing the Soap: New and Selected Poems by William Kloefkorn (1932-2011) feels like a journey back in time to a vanished America, a world of farmers and horses, streets with butchers and barbers, farmwives making biscuits or pulling onions in the garden. We witness the triumphs and disappointments, labors, loves and lusts, Sunday school sermons and picnics of good rural folk. The terrain feels familiar, situated not far from that of fellow Nebraskan Ted Kooser or Kentucky's Wendell Berry, or, in the generation before them, that of William Stafford or Robert Penn Warren—an inheritance of acres once in the hands of the Romantics and pastoralists, though toughened up for a midwestern, hardscrabble twentieth century. But subject matter, time, and location, of course, do no more than set the stage for a poem's artistry and meaning, as poems by Natasha Trethewey or Frank O'Hara attest.

Kloefkorn, who recently passed away, authored twelve books of poetry, four memoirs, two story collections, and a book of children's Christmas stories. In 1982, he was appointed state poet of Nebraska. (Before him, in 1921, the Nebraska legislature granted the title "Poet Laureate of Nebraska" to John Neihardt, who took the poetic laurels to his grave in 1973.) Kloefkorn's Swallowing the Soap is a big book, 439 pages, as befits the oeuvre of a prolific writer in his final years. It comprehends a life and a way of life.

Appropriate to the poems' settings, the language is plain; poems are carried by the stories they tell. The style seems untouched by the ironic, postmodern surface play of much contemporary poetry. Lines don't sizzle like fuses bursting in metaphysical or postmodern fireworks. The fireworks here are literal—black cats, bottle rockets, roman candles. We also find few poems addressing politics, racism, or other maladies festering beneath the surface of twentieth-century America.

The language, while plain, is anything but dull. It is vibrant and alive, often unforgettable. Kloefkorn's ear for the midwestern rural vernacular is pitch-perfect, and his lines of dialogue and bits of country speech are alternately hilarious and deeply poignant. Like Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology of 1915, Swallowing the Soap gives voice to characters engaged in everyday, revelatory goings-on. Lines reach for, and often achieve, a wisdom distilled from the ordinary. In "Epitaph for a Grandfather," in a graveyard, "the preacher, from Ecclesiastes, / settles my grandfather into its wry, inclusive scheme, / and before the last fine grain of Scripture / scours the coffin, / several of the stoutest mourners' eyes / already are at the axles of their Fords and Chevys, wanting out" (145).

The humor of the book—gallows and otherwise—alone is worth every penny of the price. There's a wonderful group of poems from Kloefkorn's earlier book, ludi jr (1983), which constitute a sort of lighter, brighter version of John Berryman's Dream Songs (two compilations of poetry published in 1964 and 1968). A few titles will give a taste: "plowing the north forty, ludi jr unearths the remnants of his paternal grandfather"; "ludi jr turns cartwheels and backflips from one end of the gymnasium to the other"; "ludi jr as conductor, by which means the cow and the milkstool are however briefly united"; "after spending 97 years with his nose to the grindstone, ludi jr admits that he has failed in his effort to invent the wheel."

Since many of Kloefkorn's individual collections are thematically unified, sections in this "Selected Poems" have a satisfying coherence. Poems from Stocker (1978), for example, give us the town wit delivering the low-down on the downhome: "Stocker said the air that came from / Mrs. Wilma Hunt / Had no more teeth in it / Than Prohibition" (112). Poems from Honeymoon (1982) beautifully court and make love to the speaker's wife Doris. "I go into the haymow with Doris, / into sunslants festive with dust. // Doris fills all those gaps between her teeth / with splinters...