Episode 057 Abandoned Farmhouse - Ted Kooser

Connor and Jack take a detour into American gothic territory with Ted Kooser's eerie "Abandoned Farmhouse." They hone in on what makes the poem so creepy, how the specific and the unnamed work together to heighten its unsettling atmosphere, and end up reflecting on how it almost sounds like a horrific children's book.

Read the poem below.
 More on Ted Kooser, here.

Abandoned Farmhouse By: Ted Kooser

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes on a pile of broken dishes by the house; a tall man too, says the length of the bed in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back on the floor below the window, dusty with sun; but not a man for farming, say the fields cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves covered with oilcloth, and they had a child, says the sandbox made from a tractor tire. Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole. And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames. It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste. And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard like branches after a storm—a rubber cow, a rusty tractor with a broken plow, a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.