Here is a new, hopefully weekly, segment where we discuss a poet and some of their work.
This week’s poet is one of my favorites, Ted Kooser.
Background:
Ted Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa in 1939. He earned a B.A. from Iowa State University in 1962 and an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska in 1968. For most of his life he worked as an insurance executive in Lincoln, Nebraska and would get up early to write poetry before going to work. He is now retired, and lives near the village of Garland, Nebraska with his wife Kathleen Rutledge.
Acclaim:
Ted served as Poet Laureate in the United States from 2004-2006. Other honors include: a Pushcart Prize, two NEA fellowships in poetry, the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia, the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry with his book “Delights and Shadows” in 2005.
Examples:
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.
Carrie
“There’s never an end to dust
and dusting,” my aunt would say
as her rag, like a thunderhead,
scudded across the yellow oak
of her little house. There she lived
seventy years with a ball
of compulsion closed in her fist,
and an elbow that creaked and popped
like a branch in a storm. Now dust
is her hands and dust her heart.
There’s never an end to it.
The Blind Always Come As Such A Surprise
The blind always come as such a surprise,
suddenly filling an elevator
with a great white porcupine of canes,
or coming down upon us in a noisy crowd
like the eye of a hurricane.
The dashboards of cars stopped at crosswalks
and the shoes of commuters on trains
are covered with sentences
struck down in mid-flight by the canes of the blind.
Each of them changes our lives,
tapping across the bright circles of our ambitions
like cracks traversing the favorite china.
Pocket Poem
If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked for you too long
to put it in your picket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.
So what do you think? What do you look for in your poetry? Are there any authors you’d like to see covered?
Sources:
http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/kooser.html
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Ted-Kooser
