The answer is yes and no. Because everyday American life includes a large portion of psychic darkness: social injustice, aggressions and preventable tragedies. Poetry that avoids the terrifying, the ugly and the cruel offers a distorted vision of life, and so turns away from the possibility for greatness. Even when his beloved wife dies, he refrains from cursing the night. In Kooser's world tragedy is to be borne, loss and injustice are to be passively received. He protests nothing, makes no waves and ignores the bitterness, despair and anger that are also valid human experiences.
Allan Ginsberg emerged from the Thoreau-Whitman-Williams tradition howling with the junkies in naked city streets, writing about war, greed, sex and hatred as well as their transcendence. Time will tell if his work will speak to future generations, but it cannot be said that Ginsberg did not truly render America’s darkness as he experienced it, in demotic American speech, as he learned to do from older poets in our homegrown tradition. Whitman wrote about the civil war dead, Williams about sick babies living in poverty. There may not be a Starbuck’s in Kooser’s hometown, but there are killers, junkies, homophobes and maybe a sleeper cell. And probably a developer revving up his cement mixers, ready to cover the plains with malls and parking lots. Simply ignoring them limits Kooser's palette and weakens his work’s necessity.
