“In his book “Memoir: An Introduction,” from 2011, the scholar G. Thomas Couser argues that we go to the genre not so much for detail or style as for “wisdom and self-knowledge,” for what the main character, who is always the author, has learned. Sometimes, though, the style is the lesson. Earlier this year, the Seattle poet Paul Hunter published “Clownery,” which follows Hunter from his birth in the rural Midwest, through college, marriage, fatherhood, divorce, high-school and college teaching, grease- and gear-filled shirtsleeve jobs, caregiving for an ill sister and playing with grandchildren. The chapters conclude with Hunter’s late-life meditations, “trying to keep from a lip-smacking bitterness” as he imagines “the end of the planet as a hospitable home.” Hunter published his first chapbook in 1970, and has been giving us verse about rural and wild America, and practical prose about sustainable farming, every few years since 2000. In “Clownery,” rather than using “I” or “me,” or naming any characters, Hunter tells his own story as that of a nameless “clown.”…