A Birthday Poem
Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.
- Ted Kooser, Jan 13, 2003
After Years
Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.
- Ted Kooser, Jan 13, 2003
Flying at Night
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
- Ted Kooser, April 1, 2004
In January
Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.
- Ted Kooser, Jan 13, 2003
Selecting a Reader
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned." And she will.
- Ted Kooser, Jan 13, 2003
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Biography of Ted Kooser
Poet and essayist Ted Kooser is known for his honest, accessible verse that celebrates the quotidian and captures a vanishing way of life. Brad Leithauser wrote in the New York Times Book Review that, “Whether or not he originally set out to…[Kooser’s] become, perforce, an elegist.” Populated by farmers, family ancestors, and heirlooms, Kooser’s poems reflect his abiding interest in the past, but escape nostalgia in part because of their clear-eyed appraisal of its hardships. While Kooser’s work often treats themes like love, family and the passage of time, Leithauser noted that “Kooser’s poetry is rare for its sense of being so firmly and enduringly rooted in one locale.” Though Kooser does not consider himself a regional poet, his work often takes place in a recognizably Mid-western setting; when Kooser was named US Poet Laureate in 2004, he was described by the librarian of Congress as “‘the first poet laureate chosen from the Great Plains.” However, David Mason in the Prairie Schooner saw Kooser’s work as more than merely regional, arguing that Kooser’s vision was actually universal: Kooser, Mason wrote, “has mostly made short poems about perception itself, the signs of human habitation, the uncertainty of human knowledge and accomplishment.”
In his book Can Poetry Matter, the critic Dana Gioia described Kooser as a “popular poet”—not one who sells millions of books, but “popular in that unlike most of his peers he writes naturally for a nonliterary public. His style is accomplished but extremely simple—his diction drawn from common speech, his syntax conversational. His subjects are chosen from the everyday world of the Great Plains, and his sensibility, though more subtle and articulate, is that of the average Midwesterner. Kooser never makes an allusion that an intelligent but unbookish reader will not immediately grasp. There is to my knowledge no poet of equal stature who writes so convincingly in a manner the average American can understand and appreciate.” Gioia argued that it is Kooser’s interest in providing “small but genuine insights into the world of everyday experience” that cut him off from the “specialized minority readership that now sustains poetry.”
Though Gioia noted that Kooser has “not received sustained attention from academic critics,” he is considered by some to be among the best poets of his generation. However, Kooser’s fame—including a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry—came late in his career. Kooser began writing in his late teens and took a position teaching high school after graduating from Iowa State University in 1962. He enrolled in the graduate writing program at the University of Nebraska but essentially flunked out a year later. Realizing that he had to make a living, Kooser took an entry-level job with an insurance company in Nebraska. He would remain in the industry until 1999, eventually becoming a vice-president of Lincoln Benefit Life Company. Throughout his insurance career, Kooser wrote poems, usually from about five-thirty to seven o’clock each morning before he went to the office. Kooser has wryly noted that, though both he and Wallace Stevens spent their working lives as insurance executives, Stevens had far more time to write on the job.
Kooser’s early work attends to the subjects that continue to shape his career: the trials and troubles of inhabitants of the Midwest, heirlooms and objects of the past, and observation of everyday life.
- Kooser’s first new and selected, Sure Signs (1980) was critically praised. The Black Warrior Book Review maintained it “could well become a classic precisely because so many of the poems are not only excellent but are readily possessible.”
In Blizzard Voices (1986), Kooser records the devastation of the “Children’s Blizzard” of 1888, using documents written at the time as well as reminisces recorded later. The Omaha World-Herald called it a “reader’s theater…short but powerful.”
The well-observed truths of Kooser’s next book, Weather Central (1994), led Booklist critic Ray Olson to note that “the scenes and actions in [Kooser’s] poetry (especially the way that, in several poems, light—the quintessential physical reality on the plains—is a virtually corporeal actor) will seem, to paraphrase Pope, things often seen but ne’er so well observed.”
In the late 1990s, Kooser developed cancer and gave up both his insurance job and writing. When he began to write again, it was to paste daily poems on postcards he sent in correspondence with his friend and fellow writer Jim Harrison. The result was the collection of poems called Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (2001). In poems both both playful and serious, Kooser avoids talking directly about his illness. Rather, he refers to disease and the possibility of dying in metaphors focusing on the countryside around his Nebraska home, where he took long walks for inspiration. Kooser’s gift for simile and metaphor is notable: “Kooser is one of the best makers of metaphor alive in the country, and for this alone he deserves honor,” wrote Mason in a review of Winter Morning Walks for Prairie Schooner.
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American poet: Ted Kooser is presidential professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He served as poet laureate from 2004-06, and his book "Delights & Shadows" won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2005. |
Kooser strayed from poetry with his next book, a collection of essays titled Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (2002). Once again, Kooser zeroes in on the place he calls home. Just outside of Garland, Nebraska, the community is facetiously referred to as the “Bohemian Alps.” The essays cover one year, or four seasons, in the author’s life. Although Kooser reflects on his younger days, the essays focus largely on the details of his current life and surroundings. In a contribution to Writer, Kate Flaherty said, “Kooser’s meditations on life in southeastern Nebraska are as meticulous and exquisite as his many collections of poetry, and his quiet reticence and dry humor are refreshing in this age of spill-it-all memoirs.”
For Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (2003) Kooser again teamed up with Harrison to publish their correspondence consisting of entirely short poems written to each other while Kooser was recovering from cancer. Writing in Poetry, contributor Ray Olson noted that “wit and wisdom” are the mainstay of these correspondences. Olson added, “Their conversation always repays eavesdropping.”
Kooser’s next book, Delights and Shadows (2004) went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In the Washington Post poet and critic Ed Hirsch noted that “there is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser’s work, but it especially seems to animate his new collection of poems.” Describing the work as “a book of portraits and landscapes…small wonders and hard dualisms,” Hirsch compared Kooser’s art to other Great Plains’ poets who write “an unadorned, pragmatic, quintessentially American poetry of empty places, of farmland and low-slung cities,” crafting poems of “sturdy forthrightness with hidden depths.”
When Kooser was named America’s national poet laureate in 2004, the honor coincided with the publication of Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985 (2005), a collection of his previously published poetry. At the time, the self-effacing poet was by no means a household name. Of Flying at Night, New York Times Book Review contributor Brad Leithauser wrote, “This is good, honest work,” and Library Journal reviewer Louis McKee wrote that “Kooser’s pure American voice and clear-eyed observation are a refreshing treat after the cynical, skeptical poetry from the...coasts.”
Kooser used his post as laureate to further the cause of poetry with a general reading audience. Partnering with the Poetry Foundation, he began the “American Life in Poetry” program, which offers a free weekly poem to newspapers across the United States. The aim of the program is to raise the visibility of poetry.
Kooser’s other publications, including The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets (2005) and Writing Brave and Free (2006), offer help to aspiring poets and writers, both in the guise of practical writing tips and essays on poetry, poets, and craft.
Kooser’s next non-fiction book, Lights on a Ground of Darkness (2009) returned to the meditations on place that marked Local Wonders, though the book focuses on Kooser’s family, especially his Uncle Elvy. David Ulin of the Lost Angeles Times described the book as “written in a prose as spare as a winter sunset,” adding that “it is an elegy, not just for Kooser’s forebears but for all of us.”
Kooser teaches poetry and nonfiction at the University of Nebraska, and continues to write. “I waste very little time anymore,” he said an interview for the University of Nebraska English Department newsletter. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, his many honors and awards include the Nebraska Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Commenting on his writing, Kooser also told Contemporary Authors: “I write for other people with the hope that I can help them to see the wonderful things within their everyday experiences. In short, I want to show people how interesting the ordinary world can be if you pay attention.”
[Updated 2010]
Career
Writer. Bankers Life Nebraska (insurance firm), Lincoln, underwriter, beginning 1964; New Business, Lincoln, second vice president, 1972; Lincoln Benefit Life Co., Lincoln, underwriter, 1973-84, second vice president for marketing, 1984-92, vice president for public relations, 1992-99. University of Nebraska, Lincoln, adjunct professor of writing, 1970-95, visiting professor, beginning 2000. Narrator of a sound recording of his work, Out of the Ordinary (lecture and poetry), 2005.
Bibliography
POETRY
- Official Entry Blank, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1969.
- Grass County, Windflower (Lincoln, NE), 1971.
- Twenty Poems, Best Cellar Press (Crete, NE), 1973.
- A Local Habitation and a Name, Solo Press (San Luis Obispo, CA), 1974.
- Not Coming to Be Barked At, Pentagram Press (Milwaukee, WI), 1976.
- Old Marriage and New: Poems, Cold Mountain Press (Austin, TX), 1978.
- Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1980.
- (With William Kloefkorn) Cottonwood County, Windflower (Lincoln, NE), 1980.
- One World at a Time, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1985.
- The Blizzard Voices, Bieler (Minneapolis, MN), 1986.
- Weather Central, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1994.
- Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison, Carnegie-Mellon University Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2001.
- (With Jim Harrison) Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2003.
- Delights and Shadows: Poems, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2004.
- Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 2005.
- Valentines, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2008.
OTHER
Hatcher (illustrated fiction), Windflower (Lincoln, NE), 1978.
(Editor) The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry, Windflower, 1980.
On Common Ground: The Poetry of William Kloefkorn, Ted Kooser, Greg Kuzma, and Don Welch, Sandhills Press (Lewiston, ID), 1983.
Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (essays), University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2002.
The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets (essays), University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2005.
(With Steve Cox) Writing Brave and Free: Encouraging Words for People Who Want to Start Writing, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2006.
Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of Place and Time, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2009.
Poetry appeared in numerous magazines and literary reviews, including the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Kansas Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Atlantic Monthly, and Shenandoah.
Further Reading
PERIODICALS
- Booklist, April 1, 2003, Ray Olson, review of Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, p. 1367; February 15, 2005, Patricia Monaghan, review of The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets, p. 1052.
- Library Journal, April 15, 2005, Louis McKee, review of Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, p. 90.
- New York Times Book Review, August 7, 2005, Brad Leithauser, review of Flying at Night, p. 15.
- Poetry, February, 2002, John Taylor, review of Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison, p. 295.
- Prairie Schooner, fall, 2002, David Mason, review of Winter Morning Walks, p. 187.
- Weekly Standard, February 14, 2005, David Mason, review of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, p. 38.
- Writer, November, 2002, Kate Flaherty, review of Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, p. 56.
ONLINE
Barnes and Noble Web site, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/writers (November 3, 2003), "Ted Kooser."
University of Nebraska Web Site, Department of English Newsletter, March 29, 2002, http://www.unl.edu/english/html/news/ (November 3, 2003), Janet Carlson, "Profiles."
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She had turned her face up into
a rain of light, and came on smiling.
The light trickled down her forehead
and into her eyes. It ran down
into the neck of her sweatshirt
and wet the white tops of her breasts.
Her brown shoes splashed on
into the light. The moment was like
a circus wagon rolling before her
through puddles of light, a cage on wheels,
and she walked fast behind it,
exuberant, curious, pushing her cane
through the bars, poking and prodding,
while the world cowered back in a corner.
Ted Kooser, “A Blind Woman” from Weather Central.
Copyright © 1994 by Ted Kooser. All rights are controlled
by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260,
Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994)
Letter in October
by Ted Kooser b. 1939 Ted Kooser
Dawn comes later and later now,
and I, who only a month ago
could sit with coffee every morning
watching the light walk down the hill
to the edge of the pond and place
a doe there, shyly drinking,
then see the light step out upon
the water, sowing reflections
to either side—a gardan
of trees that grew as if by magic -
now see no more than my face,
mirrored by darkness, pale and odd,
startled by time. While I slept,
night in its thick winter jacket
bridled the doe with a twist
of wet leaves and led her away,
then brought its black horse with harness
that creaked like a cricket, and turned
the water garden under. I woke,
and at the waiting window found
the curtains open to my open face;
beyond me, darkness. And I,
who only wished to keep looking out,
must now keep looking in.
Ted Kooser, “A Letter in October” from Weather Central.
Copyright © 1994 by Ted Kooser. All rights are controlled
by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260,
Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994)
Sunday, May 24, 2009 at 9:33AM
