How's Your Kooser?

Kooser in Repose

Let’s congratulate Ted Kooser. Some American poets do their thing — simply enough — by writing poems. Others take it a bit further: they teach poetry to our verse-starved countrymen. And still others, people like Kooser, go above and beyond and incorporate poetry into our lives on a weekly basis.

Kooser had a folksy, mid-West American upbringing. His father worked in a department store. Later, Kooser earned money and supported his family by working as an insurance salesman, all while taking night classes and earning his MFA.

He attended college in Iowa, where he was deeply influenced by William Carlos Williams, and then went on to study at the University of Nebraska, where one of his professors was the very fine Karl Shapiro. Despite such gravitas, Kooser spent much of his career working in the insurance business. Initially, his poems did not elicit high praise or recognition. But they did reflect a strong regionalism anchored in the small, rural farm towns of the Great Plains.

In an effort to get you Kooser-primed, here’s one of his poems:

Spring Plowing

West of Omaha the freshly plowed fields
steam in the night like lakes.
The smell of the earth floods over the roads.
The field mice are moving their nests
to the higher ground of fence rows,
the old among them crying out to the owls
to take them all. The paths in the grass
are loud with the squeak of their carts.
They keep their lanterns covered.

Kooser is known as one of the “most quietly original poets of his generation,” but he hasn’t been that quiet lately. In a project funded by the Poetry Foundation, Kooser runs American Life in Poetry, which offers free weekly poetry-focused columns for newspapers. That means people across the country can open their morning papers to find — gasp — poetry!

Oh, this is poetry to our ears.

Newspapers like The New York Times are following suit, publishing columns dedicated to poetry. The Times adds a cherry on top here by publishing an essay alongside each poem. It’s called Poetry Pairing and holds true to Kooser’s belief that poetry should be accessible and not so darn high brow. Here’s a quiet round of original applause to good old TK!

– Lori Huskey

Video: Ted Kooser Poetry Reading