Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

It’s hard, in the course of one month, for us to give you, the listener, or the reader, a full spectrum overview of all that is poetry. As the curator of the series, all I can say is that I try my best to look for shortcomings, and fill them.  One is that we have probably not featured enough poems by poet laureates. Today we’ll chip away at that deficit with a poem by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. (https://www.tedkooser.net/)

Today’s poem is titled In the Basement of the Goodwill Store, and the full text is online at the Poetry Foundation website (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42631/in-the-basement-of-the-goodwill-store).

I’m going to try and squeeze in two concepts and an anecdote. First is the idea, the conceit in this case, that things can take on a life of their own without us. A second life perhaps. For those elsewhere, or from the more monied side of the spectrum, let me explain that the Goodwill is a store that makes its money by selling people’s discards to other people for a profit. Yes, they are making money off the poor, but things can be cheaply had by those who need them, in places where more affluent stores would never consider going.

Kooser, as poets commonly do, gets across this idea, and its atmospherics, by talking through the small details:

In musty light, in the thin brown air

of damp carpet, doll heads and rust,

beneath long rows of sharp footfalls

like nails in a lid, an old man stands

trying on glasses, lifting each pair

from the box like a glittering fish

and holding it up to the light

of a dirty bulb.

I want to comment on how artfully Kooser chooses his descriptive words: the “thin brown air”, “damp carpet” - can you smell the mustiness? And especially the sharp footfalls - the implication, from the way it is worded, is that they might just as well be the sound of nails in his coffin lid.

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