Ted Kooser
BY UNL Publications AND Photography

Do you think politics is an appropriate subject for an art form such as poetry? Are there any political poets whose work you like?

There are great poems, like the one by William Stafford about the lizard at the bomb testing range, that are indeed political, and are of such high quality that they last and last. Those are the poems worth writing, and I think those are the poems that all poets would like to write. Stafford’s “At the Bomb Testing Site” is a work of art, whereas a lot of poems fall short of art.

What are your views concerning online versus print magazines? Do you think poetry aesthetics will change when they are no longer just a matter of printed words on the page but also words on the screen?

The advantage of traditional literary magazines is that the number of pages is finite, and decisions as to which poem to publish have to be made with that limit in mind. So if a traditional little magazine has room for, say, twenty poems, just twenty get selected and presented. It’s my feeling that since the internet has infinite capacity, anything goes.

You’ve said that you would like to see public school teachers given resources so they can more effectively inspire students to enjoy poetry. What is one way in which to engage a student’s interest in poetry?

I think teachers need to emphasize the pleasures of poetry and quit talking about the MEANING. If students can find pleasure in reading poems, they’ll go on reading them. But to treat a poem like a problem that needs to be solved is no fun, and discouraging.

Part of the pleasure of poetry is auditory, and I recommend that teachers be sure to read poems aloud. Some students learn to read in such a way that a word symbolizes an idea, and there’s no auditory step. Thus those students don’t understand that poems have a lot of music. It helps immensely to read them aloud.