Laureate looks back, ahead
Given how the last 17 months have gone for Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser of Garland, it's unlikely he'll return to the shadows after his term ends in May. Related: Valentine's Day poems through the years | 10 things to know about Ted Kooser Video: See Kooser read from his work
BY JoANNE YOUNG | Lincoln Journal Star
It’s Saturday night, the first one in February, and back home in rural Garland Ted Kooser has dressed in a black suit, white shirt, red tie with hearts, said a few departing words to dogs Alice and Howard, and driven the familiar path to Lincoln with his wife.
He’s appearing at tonight’s Lincoln Symphony performance, Passion & Poetry. After a preconcert conversation with patrons, he precedes Prokofiev with “A Perfect Heart” and “Heart of Gold,” two from his collection of 21 valentine poems. He smiles and shakes hands with conductor Edward Polochick, disappears stage right, then reappears later to read docent Kathleen Scheerer’s favorite: “Barn Owl.”
He reads 10 in all. They are sensual, funny, tender.
The symphony concludes. The conductor takes a deep, passionate bow. Kooser bends. Down, up, short, sweet.
That’s what is so endearing about our poet.
His discomfort with taking a bow. His laughing story about the little kid who thought he was Yoda. His unrestricted outreach: a symphony concert one night, a junior high poetry reading the next afternoon.
His mailing list of 1,500 women for his coveted annual valentine poems.
A whirlwind tenure
In 17 months as U.S. poet laureate, Kooser’s appearances and interviews in Nebraska and around the country number in the hundreds. He has shared stage time with John Prine, delivered commencement addresses, talked to conventions of teachers of English, provided poetic invocations and met with NU alums at cocktail parties to encourage support for the university.
The British invited him over, too.
“I just decided that the U.S. poet laureate ought to be staying in the U.S.”
Although his tenure as poet of the people will end in May with a final lecture and reading at the Library of Congress, his schedule continues, even into 2007.
“The activity is not going to diminish much when I’m no longer poet laureate, I don’t think.”
His Pulitzer Prize for “Delights and Shadows” ensured that.
Kooser remembers lying on the floor of his bedroom 24 hours after being named poet laureate, after doing one interview after another with reporters, just lying there looking at the ceiling, thinking he was not going to be able to do this.
“I have had a lot more strength for this than I thought I would,” he says now.
He has gladly made himself accessible — talked to book clubs, marshaled parades — and has endured the tedium of air travel. No weekends off.
But, oh, how he misses being home, with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, and Alice and Howard.
“If I look a couple of events at a time ahead, then I’m OK. If I start studying what’s coming up with all of them, it’s just sort of overpowering,” he says.
He has touched people, brought them back to a place they felt excluded from since their school years.
So he happily puts on his suit and tie and sits in a Westbrook lecture hall at the university to be interviewed by Nebraska Public Radio’s William Stibor before the symphony begins.
He tells him the women attending the night’s performance will get the 2006 Kooser valentine along with tonight’s program.
Don’t the men deserve some love, too, Ted?
“They can get it elsewhere.”
He stole the valentine idea 21 years ago from his friend Dace Burdic, who sends out her own valentines, he says.
In time for this Valentine’s Day, Brooding Heron Press, in Waldron, Wash., printed 500 copies of “Out of That Moment,” a collection of the poems from 1986 to the present. Fifty of the books were handbound and signed by the author, printer and binder. The dedication reads: With my thanks for the patience of all the women I’ve flirted with during the past 20 years.
The poems have evolved with nontraditional ties to Valentine’s Day, some tenuously attached, he says, with a heart, or a bit of red.
The holy ordinary
Good poems happen in the process of writing, if the writer is patient.
He’s never had an “idea” for a poem, Kooser says. Those that are idea-driven usually fail. You don’t, for example, set out to write a poem about your father’s death. But you may be sitting in an auditorium and see an empty seat, and in writing about the seat, your grief will pour over your words.
In his own writing life, something good may happen every 10 days or so. There he is, in the early morning, coffee cup close by, writing away.
“And all of a sudden something comes that takes the top of your head off.”
Did I write that? Did I?
Since August 2004, all the things he must attend to have distracted him from his writing, he says. The distractions come in the form of six to eight letters or postcards a day that he wants to answer. Sixty e-mails. Phone calls.
In that period, he has produced only three or four poems he cares about.
“I don’t think I’m writing very well,” he says. “I can’t quite get to that sort of state of mind that’s really conducive to writing. You know, it requires some serenity.”
So he bought a little building in Dwight, around the corner from Cy’s Café, where for $4.99 on Wednesdays you can get a heavy Bohemian meal of roast pork, dumplings, sauerkraut, dressing, applesauce and rye bread.
He closed on the little brick storefront at the end of January, and already it has an old desk from his wife’s grandmother’s home in Valentine, a chair and a new lamp.
The poet intends for this building, 25 feet wide, 65 feet deep and 10 miles northwest of his house, to be the place he can find some writing serenity. No telephone. No computer.
Next door is a silver maple, more than 40 feet tall with no less than 10 thick branches pointing in all directions. It might be 150 years old, or it might be just half that if, indeed, it did grow from the ashes of a dance hall that burned in the ’30s. Regardless, Kooser regards the tree with delight.
He can’t wait to have the time to fix up the place. It may be only a few miles from his house, but it’s a long way from 1963 and the refrigerator box in the corner of his bedroom at 1955 A St., where he would write poems and then post them on the cardboard walls.
In those days, his job at Banker’s Life Nebraska produced poems about the sternness of office life, about secretarial pools and the death of a co-worker.
“All my life I had wanted to be different from everyone else,” he says about his early days in life insurance. “And now I found myself buried at the bottom of everyone else, desperately writing my mean little poems and slipping them into the mail like messages in bottles.”
His poems changed after Banker’s Life summoned Reinhold Marxhausen, a Concordia College professor, to show its weary workers there was beauty, even in that insurance building.
Kooser began to write about the charm of the familiar, the holy ordinary. A leaky faucet. A potato. An ironing board.
Those years of paying attention to the commonplace are what led the nation to pay attention to him.
Humble, practical teacher
Now, in addition to creating, he teaches. He is the celebrity faculty face at a university he laughingly remembers threw him out of graduate school a few decades ago.
At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he tutors selected graduate students in poetry and nonfiction writing, meeting with each one individually for an hour a week.
Kooser is a humble, practical teacher who helps them become more honest, more attentive poets, student Lucas Stock says. During his first workshop with Kooser, he remembered a late night poring over a poem about a man hunting for golf balls.
“I had given it some inappropriately literary title, hoping to impress the U.S. poet laureate,” Stock says. “The next day, once he had finished reading it, he took his black Sharpie and crossed out the title. ‘This title doesn’t fit the poem,’ he said. The jig was up.”
For Tyrone Jaeger, a Ph.D. student in creative writing, the lesson was in seeing a normal person win a Pulitzer and be named poet laureate.
“It showed that these writers I have studied … are not pseudo gods sitting in a room and conversing with some higher spirit,” Jaeger says.
If anything, it is encouraging to see someone as unassuming as Kooser rise to such a status, he says.
“It made me think a lot about how you handle yourself as a writer and a public figure.”
But you don’t have to take a class to learn from the poet.
As he talked and read poems to the business communicators in January, Kooser struck a chord with Ameritas employee Sue Lyman.
“I just never knew poetry could be so powerful,” she says. “I love his poem ‘Pearl.’ You read a turn of a phrase, and it’s just perfect. It takes you exactly where you want to go.
“He makes me want to write some poetry. Right now.”
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
BY JoANNE YOUNG | Lincoln Journal Star
It’s Saturday night, the first one in February, and back home in rural Garland Ted Kooser has dressed in a black suit, white shirt, red tie with hearts, said a few departing words to dogs Alice and Howard, and driven the familiar path to Lincoln with his wife.
He’s appearing at tonight’s Lincoln Symphony performance, Passion & Poetry. After a preconcert conversation with patrons, he precedes Prokofiev with “A Perfect Heart” and “Heart of Gold,” two from his collection of 21 valentine poems. He smiles and shakes hands with conductor Edward Polochick, disappears stage right, then reappears later to read docent Kathleen Scheerer’s favorite: “Barn Owl.”
He reads 10 in all. They are sensual, funny, tender.
The symphony concludes. The conductor takes a deep, passionate bow. Kooser bends. Down, up, short, sweet.
That’s what is so endearing about our poet.
His discomfort with taking a bow. His laughing story about the little kid who thought he was Yoda. His unrestricted outreach: a symphony concert one night, a junior high poetry reading the next afternoon.
His mailing list of 1,500 women for his coveted annual valentine poems.
A whirlwind tenure
In 17 months as U.S. poet laureate, Kooser’s appearances and interviews in Nebraska and around the country number in the hundreds. He has shared stage time with John Prine, delivered commencement addresses, talked to conventions of teachers of English, provided poetic invocations and met with NU alums at cocktail parties to encourage support for the university.
The British invited him over, too.
“I just decided that the U.S. poet laureate ought to be staying in the U.S.”
Although his tenure as poet of the people will end in May with a final lecture and reading at the Library of Congress, his schedule continues, even into 2007.
“The activity is not going to diminish much when I’m no longer poet laureate, I don’t think.”
His Pulitzer Prize for “Delights and Shadows” ensured that.
Kooser remembers lying on the floor of his bedroom 24 hours after being named poet laureate, after doing one interview after another with reporters, just lying there looking at the ceiling, thinking he was not going to be able to do this.
“I have had a lot more strength for this than I thought I would,” he says now.
He has gladly made himself accessible — talked to book clubs, marshaled parades — and has endured the tedium of air travel. No weekends off.
But, oh, how he misses being home, with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, and Alice and Howard.
“If I look a couple of events at a time ahead, then I’m OK. If I start studying what’s coming up with all of them, it’s just sort of overpowering,” he says.
He has touched people, brought them back to a place they felt excluded from since their school years.
So he happily puts on his suit and tie and sits in a Westbrook lecture hall at the university to be interviewed by Nebraska Public Radio’s William Stibor before the symphony begins.
He tells him the women attending the night’s performance will get the 2006 Kooser valentine along with tonight’s program.
Don’t the men deserve some love, too, Ted?
“They can get it elsewhere.”
He stole the valentine idea 21 years ago from his friend Dace Burdic, who sends out her own valentines, he says.
In time for this Valentine’s Day, Brooding Heron Press, in Waldron, Wash., printed 500 copies of “Out of That Moment,” a collection of the poems from 1986 to the present. Fifty of the books were handbound and signed by the author, printer and binder. The dedication reads: With my thanks for the patience of all the women I’ve flirted with during the past 20 years.
The poems have evolved with nontraditional ties to Valentine’s Day, some tenuously attached, he says, with a heart, or a bit of red.
The holy ordinary
Good poems happen in the process of writing, if the writer is patient.
He’s never had an “idea” for a poem, Kooser says. Those that are idea-driven usually fail. You don’t, for example, set out to write a poem about your father’s death. But you may be sitting in an auditorium and see an empty seat, and in writing about the seat, your grief will pour over your words.
In his own writing life, something good may happen every 10 days or so. There he is, in the early morning, coffee cup close by, writing away.
“And all of a sudden something comes that takes the top of your head off.”
Did I write that? Did I?
Since August 2004, all the things he must attend to have distracted him from his writing, he says. The distractions come in the form of six to eight letters or postcards a day that he wants to answer. Sixty e-mails. Phone calls.
In that period, he has produced only three or four poems he cares about.
“I don’t think I’m writing very well,” he says. “I can’t quite get to that sort of state of mind that’s really conducive to writing. You know, it requires some serenity.”
So he bought a little building in Dwight, around the corner from Cy’s Café, where for $4.99 on Wednesdays you can get a heavy Bohemian meal of roast pork, dumplings, sauerkraut, dressing, applesauce and rye bread.
He closed on the little brick storefront at the end of January, and already it has an old desk from his wife’s grandmother’s home in Valentine, a chair and a new lamp.
The poet intends for this building, 25 feet wide, 65 feet deep and 10 miles northwest of his house, to be the place he can find some writing serenity. No telephone. No computer.
Next door is a silver maple, more than 40 feet tall with no less than 10 thick branches pointing in all directions. It might be 150 years old, or it might be just half that if, indeed, it did grow from the ashes of a dance hall that burned in the ’30s. Regardless, Kooser regards the tree with delight.
He can’t wait to have the time to fix up the place. It may be only a few miles from his house, but it’s a long way from 1963 and the refrigerator box in the corner of his bedroom at 1955 A St., where he would write poems and then post them on the cardboard walls.
In those days, his job at Banker’s Life Nebraska produced poems about the sternness of office life, about secretarial pools and the death of a co-worker.
“All my life I had wanted to be different from everyone else,” he says about his early days in life insurance. “And now I found myself buried at the bottom of everyone else, desperately writing my mean little poems and slipping them into the mail like messages in bottles.”
His poems changed after Banker’s Life summoned Reinhold Marxhausen, a Concordia College professor, to show its weary workers there was beauty, even in that insurance building.
Kooser began to write about the charm of the familiar, the holy ordinary. A leaky faucet. A potato. An ironing board.
Those years of paying attention to the commonplace are what led the nation to pay attention to him.
Humble, practical teacher
Now, in addition to creating, he teaches. He is the celebrity faculty face at a university he laughingly remembers threw him out of graduate school a few decades ago.
At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he tutors selected graduate students in poetry and nonfiction writing, meeting with each one individually for an hour a week.
Kooser is a humble, practical teacher who helps them become more honest, more attentive poets, student Lucas Stock says. During his first workshop with Kooser, he remembered a late night poring over a poem about a man hunting for golf balls.
“I had given it some inappropriately literary title, hoping to impress the U.S. poet laureate,” Stock says. “The next day, once he had finished reading it, he took his black Sharpie and crossed out the title. ‘This title doesn’t fit the poem,’ he said. The jig was up.”
For Tyrone Jaeger, a Ph.D. student in creative writing, the lesson was in seeing a normal person win a Pulitzer and be named poet laureate.
“It showed that these writers I have studied … are not pseudo gods sitting in a room and conversing with some higher spirit,” Jaeger says.
If anything, it is encouraging to see someone as unassuming as Kooser rise to such a status, he says.
“It made me think a lot about how you handle yourself as a writer and a public figure.”
But you don’t have to take a class to learn from the poet.
As he talked and read poems to the business communicators in January, Kooser struck a chord with Ameritas employee Sue Lyman.
“I just never knew poetry could be so powerful,” she says. “I love his poem ‘Pearl.’ You read a turn of a phrase, and it’s just perfect. It takes you exactly where you want to go.
“He makes me want to write some poetry. Right now.”
Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.
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