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Morning Holds, What Still Speaks, The Weight of Parts, Briefcase & Verse, Pocket Relics.
The Reverence issue / April 25, 2026
Welcome to The Reverence Issue, where we slow down long enough to let ordinary things speak. This issue opens with the poem Morning from a Front Porch in Fall, a meditation on the quiet threshold between night and day, where smoke, shadow, and the sounds of a ranch unfold into something larger. From there, we turn to my all-time favorite poet, Ted Kooser. Born on this day in 1939, he spent decades rising before dawn to write before heading off to sell insurance. His life reminds us that discipline and devotion don't require dramatic sacrifice, just an alarm clock and the willingness to answer it. Happy 87th, Ted!
We also explore synecdoche, the poetic device that lets a single object stand in for an entire life, and offer six prints of ordinary things rendered with the full attention they deserve.
Look closely. That's where it all begins.
Jason
jasonzguest.com
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Featured Poem
Echoes
Devices
Testaments
Stash
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Featured Poem
Morning from a Front Porch in Fall
Morning from a Front Porch in Fall
by Jason Z Guest
Predawn, under moonlight,
three screen doors wink at
stairs of stone staring from
outside the wrap-around porch.
A pit flame smolders,
silk ceilings of smoke
shielding us from bears
roaming across dark skies.
Inside we seek council
from a thermometer
mounted to a beam –
early morning has its needs.
like coffee, brewing us
into an awakened state
where we sit, wrapped in
the comfort of this porch.
A shadow barks at danger
and dogs from a nearby ranch
respond with yips and howls
to remind the deer just how far
sound carries across brisk air.
Shhh! The heavens vowed
to keep quiet and squeeze out
A few more drops of light,
But the dawn of a gust now
blows life into the screens,
rousing those of us wrapped in
the comfort of this porch.
It carries away deep blues
over bluestem hills, scurrying
to arrange prairie savannah views
for the next morning riser.
Gone, too, the bark scorpions,
the barn swallows on tailwinds,
the yesterdays when we showered
under meteor showers.
So, too, those tender days,
sounds of loaded springs
clapping and slapping from
the ins and outs of child’s play,
or rumbles of scooters
racing across concrete
like distant thunder of storms
wedged to our north and south.
Wet winds now whisk moisture
across lavender skies
like hurried theater curtains
Drawn for a vaudeville show.
Leaves rattle across asphalt
And the morning sun thickens
Into a soft white sphere, a
porcelain cup brimmed in cream.
A front feeder stood empty
all summer, but suddenly
triggers a spinner of corn,
pinwheeling fresh feed
across a trampled earth,
hardened like the footprints
of our memories wrapped into
the comfort of this porch,
Like its rough history held
In the pages of a past,
breaking the silence
Of our retreating minds.
A goat bleats. The rooster
no longer crows. The morning
resets as I stand staring from
inside the wrap-around porch.
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Echoes
Bringing Us News of Ourselves
On this day in 1939, Ted Kooser was born. The Ames, Iowa native sold insurance by day and wrote in the quiet hours about everyday life, including farmhouses, small-town sidewalks, grandmothers, and the natural world with all its creatures. He grew up on the Great Plains, where there is nothing to hide behind, so he learned to look closely. His poems stay near the ground and refuse to reach beyond what is in front of him. They hold what is there and make you see it. |
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Kooser published Official Entry Blank in 1969. For decades he kept at it: Small presses, Christmas postcards with hand-drawn poems, his mornings at Lincoln Benefit Life with briefcase in hand, a mind already working through images from before sunrise.
In 2004, at sixty-five, he became United States Poet Laureate, the first from the Plains. A year later, Delights & Shadows took the Pulitzer. His has been a work ethic of decades in the dark, stacking up poetic lines like fence posts in winter.
Ted Kooser's Echoes proves that the plainest language can carry the heaviest feeling. Watch him read and reflect on his work at UC Santa Barbara below.
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Devices
Synecdoche
This week's device is synecdoche, the part that stands for the whole. It is one of the oldest moves in poetry and one of the most under-appreciated, perhaps because it works so quietly that you sometimes miss it. The classic examples are familiar enough. "All hands on deck" does not mean just hands. "Pass me a Coke"could simply represent any soda. A part is offered in place of the whole, and the mind fills the rest in without effort. |
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In James Dickey's poem "Cherrylog Road," from Helmets (1964), he writes:
"Off Highway 106
At Cherrylog Road I entered
The '34 Ford without wheels
Smothered in kudzu."
The ’34 Ford carries more than rust and kudzu. It stands in for the life that once pressed against its seats. I imagine the people who drove it, fogged its windows, and left it when it had no more use for them, or they had no more use for it. Dickey never gives you the people. He gives you the car, and lets it speak for everything it witnessed. That is synecdoche at its most Southern.
Southern poetry lives on this instinct. A truck on cinder blocks can hold an entire marriage. A field gone to kudzu can hold a farm’s failed ambition. The South has always known abandoned things carry the heaviest stories. Synecdoche is just the word for what the junkyard already knew.
If you want to see synecdoche taken to its most obsessive extreme, watch Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, a film where a director stages his entire life as a play.
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Testaments
The Insurance Poet
For thirty-five years, Ted Kooser worked as a life insurance executive, where he rose to vice president at Lincoln Benefit Life in Nebraska. He wore a tie and commuted to the office. Every morning before any of that, he got up early and wrote poetry. He wrote for an hour or an hour and a half before leaving for work, in the quiet before the house woke and before the day made its demands. By the time he retired in 1998, he had published seven collections of poetry, built in the margins of a life in insurance. |
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This is not a story about suffering for art. Kooser has said that he liked his insurance work. He found it meaningful and he was good at it. The morning hours belonged to something else, and he protected them.
Kooser also taught as a Presidential Professor in the English Department at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and later became a Professor Emeritus there. He began teaching creative writing part-time at Nebraska as far back as 1970, while still working in insurance, and continued teaching after his retirement from the insurance business in 1998.
There is a lesson in this for anyone who has ever said they do not have time. He had an alarm clock and the discipline to answer it. The poems came from that. Decades of mornings, one after another, before the world asked anything.
Be sure to visit The Poetry Foundation to learn more about Kooser by clicking the link below.
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Stash
6 Ordinary Things
There is a word for what a poet can do with a coffee cup or a worn boot or a nightshirt hanging on a hook. He looks at it until it gives something up, until the object stops being a thing and starts being a testament. Maybe it's to a life, a morning, a person who is no longer there to claim it.That is reverence. Not the reverence of altars and ceremonies, but the reverence of unhurried attention. These are the kinds of things that say: this thing matters because someone lived near it. For this issue's Stash, I made six prints in that spirit. Each one is a single ordinary object, rendered in dual tone, woodcut-style, bold and spare. Just the thing itself, given the full frame. |
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A coffee cup. A screen door. A mason jar. A porch broom. A work boot. A nightshirt on a hook.
You will recognize all of them. That is the point. These are not exotic or remarkable objects. They are the objects of an ordinary life, which is the only life most of us have, and the one I like to notice at times in my poetry.
Download them. Put one on your phone. Pin one above your desk where you write. Let it remind you that the thing sitting closest to you right now is already asking to be seen.
You only have to stop and look.
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