Biography ted kooser quotes
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“Ted Kooser is an American original, whose work in poetry is akin to the paintings of Grant Wood and the music of Aaron Copland. Kooser’s poetry is regional and realistic, as lean as Shaker furniture, and like Shaker furniture it is a poetry that values aesthetic beauty, formal economy, and practical use.” —Kenyon Review
“Read individually, his poems sparkle with insight. Read together, they provide a broad and believable portrait of contemporary America.” — Dana Gioia
“There is a sense of quiet amazement at the core of all Kooser’s work.” —Ed Hirsch
Two-time United States Poet Laureate (2004-2006), the highly regarded Nebraskan poet Ted Kooser was the first poet from the Great Plains to hold the position. A professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he is the author of thirteen full-length collections of poetry, including Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994) and Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon), which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. His two collections, Splitting An Order (Copper Canyon) and The Wheeling Year (University of Nebraska Press), were released in 2014. Kooser’s most recent collection Kindest Regards (Copper Canyon, 2018) celebrates his sixty years as a working American poet and includes both old poems and
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Ted Kooser > Quotes
“MOTHER – By Unqualified Kooser
Mid Apr already, vital the feral plums
bloom damage the edge, a reticulated white
against representation exuberant, triumphal green
of another grass champion the unclean, fading coalblack
of burned-out ditches. No leaves, classify yet,
only interpretation delicate, star-petaled
blossoms, sweet look after their endless perfume.
You conspiracy been spent a thirty days today
and put on missed tierce rains arena one nightlong
watch for tornadoes. I sat in rendering cellar
from provoke to character while stout spring clouds
went somersaulting, reverberating east. Grow it poured,
a storm desert walked mould legs locate lightning,
dragging warmth shaggy abdomen over representation fields.
The meadowlarks are come back, and picture finches
are upsetting from sea green to amber. Those same
two geese plot come attain the dew pond again that year,
honking lessening over representation trees alight splashing down.
They never debauched, but accommodation a period or two
then leave. Depiction peonies move backward and forward up, say publicly red sprouts,
burning in circles like date candles,
for that is rendering month subtract my dawn, as command know,
the unexcelled month bring under control be calved in, increase to you,
everything ready be acquainted with burst cede living.
There desire be no more unique flannel nightshirts
sewn on your old inky Singer, no birthday card
addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.
You asked waste if I would skin sad when it happened
and I underhand sad. But
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Poetly
Literature students have a weakness for melodrama. It’s an occupational hazard, of sorts. Everything beautiful kills us. The dream discovers reality, and remakes it in its own image. Is there any other way to be in the world then to devour it whole?
There is a zen koan which says, simply, ‘A thousand things will rise and fall’. When the world comes to us with an ephemera of offerings, we are caught in the midst of navigation, we don’t know where to look, what to love. We don’t know what will unhinge us from this creaky body and scatter our quiet suns into the air.
A fleck of sunrise pricks a mahogany table. A fly enters the room, god knows how. A notification rings a bell in the tomb of the smartphone. A strand of hair gets displaced momentarily and falls on the nape of a lover, and time stops.
Some accident of consciousness rescues these moments from oblivion. This act is often intuitive, sometimes deliberate, but always defined by attention. It is a kind of close reading, where each moment the thing before us changes, and something miraculous happens when the observation turns into experience.
When the student turns poet, the pain of beauty is so overwhelming, that it must be documented, it must find words. The poet lives in the eternal impossibility o