A Life in Poetry: Ted Kooser
Ted Kooser
COURTESY OF Blue Flower Arts TED KOOSER is a two-term United States Poet Laureate (2004-2006), and the author of eleven poetry collections, including Delights and Shadows, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. His book The Poetry Home Repair Manual (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), is thought by many to be one of the best books on writing poetry. His poems have appeared in many national literary journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. Among other prizes, Kooser has received two NEA fellowships in poetry, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, The James Boatwright Prize, and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council. He lives near Garland, Nebraska, with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, and their two dogs, Alice and Howard.
“The poet’s ideas might emerge while he or she is playfully writing about, say, the appearance of a stack of storm windows lying in the grass or the way in which a praying mantis turns her head to look at the mate she’s about to eat. The poet’s ideas, his or her reasoned assessments of the world, emerge through the poetry whether intended or not.”
— FROM The Poetry Home Repair Manual
University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln & London, 2005) |
Karl Shapiro was an important writer and teacher, a mentor to you. Who were other major poets or teachers in your development as a poet? My first creative writing teacher was Will Jumper, a poet who taught at Iowa State when I was an undergraduate. I dedicated my first book to him. He put a lot of emphasis on literary forms, and was the person most responsible for urging me toward poetry. Jumper began his basic poetry writing course by having the students write 30 lines of natural description in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets. That sort of thing. We learned to write in all the poetic forms. You’ve mentioned that the Library of Congress supervises your activity with the American Life in Poetry column. Does the Library help with selecting poems for the column? Now that I’m no longer poet laureate, the Library has nothing to do with the column other than to have their name credited with its instigation. I pick the poems with the help of my assistant editor, Pat Emile, also a poet, and we customarily have a graduate student who searches literary magazines for possibilities. How do your ideas for poems begin? Most often they arise during the process of writing. As I write in my journal every morning, something may surface that feels as if it has potential, and I’ll follow it through. I have found that isn’t productive to force a poem to fit around an idea, so I rarely have an idea as we usually think of them, such as, Oh, I’m going to write a poem about the hazards of agricultural chemicals. But if I happen to be writing about something, perhaps describing a flower, my ideas about ag chemicals might show up. Do you have a definition as to what a poem is? A poem is the record of a discovery, either the discovery of something in the world, or within one’s self, or perhaps the discovery of something through the juxtaposition of sounds and sense within our language. Our job as poets is to set down the record of those discoveries in such a way that our readers will make the discoveries theirs and will delight in them. My teacher, Karl Shapiro, once said that the proper response to any work of art is joy, and if we can give joy to our readers, that’s a fine thing. |
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“I suspect that the freshest and most engaging poems most often don’t come from ideas at all. Ideas are orderly, rational, and to some degree logical. They come clothed in complete sentences, like ‘Overpopulation is the cause of all problems in the world.’ Instead, poems are triggered by catchy twists of language or little glimpses of life.”
— FROM The Poetry Home Repair Manual
University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln & London, 2005) |
In your book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, you mention that a poem could go through 30-40 revisions. Can you say something about your revision process? Nearly all of my revision has a couple of directions. One is from difficulty toward clarity, and another is from wordiness to economy. The rest is working with the hundreds of other decisions, such as which is the best word, what kind of punctuation mark is needed, and so on. The passage of time is very useful, as things keep coming to light as time goes by, and sometimes I find myself revisiting poems after a week or so just to see if I notice anything that needs fixing, and I usually do. Some poets admit they sometimes submit work too soon, before they are truly ready. How do you know when a poem is ready? I usually don’t send poems out to journals until I’ve had them around for a month or six weeks. By then they’re probably as good as I’m going to get them to be. I do have a tendency to send early drafts to friends to look at, in the enthusiasm of having just written something, and I often find that I’ve done that far too early. There are many kinds of contemporary poetry being written: innovative, received forms, free verse, political, humorous, and so on. Is there an area of poetry you see as neglected or of which you would like to see more? Not in a particular form or manner such as you describe, but I’d like to see poetry that pays more attention to how it may be received by a reader. I believe in being considerate of my readers, and not talking down to them or throwing things at them that they don’t have the ability to catch. A more generous poetry takes the reader into consideration. |
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.
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