Selecting a Reader

The poem’s title gives away one of the main themes of the work: the function and practicality of poetry. By naming the poem “Selecting a Reader,” Kooser comments on poetry's relationship to real life and the average person. In the title, Kooser mocks poetry's alleged superiority by imagining his speaker deigning to select a single ideal reader for his work. This self-mocking tone reflects Kooser’s critical attitude to obtuse works of literature; in his 2007 conversation with Kenyon Review, for example, Kooser criticizes the Modernist movement in literature, explaining that in its effort to emphasize fragmentation and alienation, it “did its best to exclude a lot of readers by its difficulty, its elitism.” For Kooser’s speaker, his selected reader is a “beautiful” (Line 1) woman. The gendered diction creates tension: The poem starts as the male speaker Kooser employs the feminine pronoun “her” (Line 1) and the term “beautiful” (Line 1). Kooser doesn’t define “beautiful,” but this first line ensures that the male gaze becomes a part of the experience of reading the poem.

As the poem continues, the timid, isolated tone of Lines 2 and 3 indicate that the speaker is not referring to a glamorous kind of beauty.