So This is Nebraska

"So This Is Nebraska” shows the influence of multiple literary movements, including Imagism, Modernism, Surrealism, and a drive to make poetry more accessible.

Imagism is a literary movement from the early 20th-century. The poets in the Imagist movement—Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, among them—emphasized, as the name implies, images. They thought sharp, clear images made the best poetry. “So This is Nebraska” contains a bevy of vivid pictures, starting with the gravel road and “billow of dust” (Line 3), then moving on to the “loosening barns” (Line 6) and atrophied pickup, before wrapping up with the “skinny old man” (Line 22). The reliance on images in “So This Is Nebraska” demonstrates the continued impact of Imagism.

“So This Is Nebraska” also bears the marks of Modernism and Surrealism. Like Imagism, these movements emerged in the 20th-century. Instead of clarity and precision, they emphasize the subjectiveness of reality and uncanny juxtaposition. “So This Is Nebraska” links to Modernism as it demonstrates how an individual perspective dominates one’s reality. In Kooser’s poem, Nebraska is a subjective experience for the speaker: it is not necessarily the reality of Nebraska for anyone else.