• 11/28/2004
  • Garland, Nebraska
  • John Mark Eberhart
  • Kansas City Star (kansascity.com)

The new U.S. poet laureate, Nebraska’s Ted Kooser, wants to bring verse back to the masses.

Just north of this nondescript village, the pavement ends and the gravel begins. Down one of those gravel roads stands a roomy farmhouse. Built into the wall of one of those rooms is a ladder. At the top of the ladder lies a lair.

A writer’s lair.

One side stands open; one “wall” is slanted ceiling. This is the place the new poet laureate of the United States does his work.

Six years ago there were days Ted Kooser had no need of that lair. He wasn’t writing poetry; he was too busy fighting for his life. He had oral cancer, and it was advanced.

“Tumor of tongue on the back side,” he recalls, “and it had spread into the lymph nodes and upper part of my neck, so I had to have radiation. (But you) keep yourself in the present. (You) wake up and say, ‘You know, I don’t think I’m going to die today. I’m probably not going to die this week. I may not die for months and months, so what am I going to do?’ You can’t just sit around and stare into space.”

Instead Kooser made not one but two books out of cancer.

As he recovered, he began taking two-mile treks each morning and by 2000 had produced Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison, a fellow poet and author of the “Legends of the Fall” novella collection. Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry was a 2003 collaboration with Harrison, who had observed that Kooser’s diagnosis had strengthened his writing to the point that it had become “overwhelmingly vivid.”

“I wasn’t a slouch at writing before,” Kooser says of Harrison’s comment. “But there’s a heightening of attention to the world that comes out of this. We all spend an enormous amount of time just worrying about what’s coming next and regretting what’s gone before. Then you get this sort of shock, and you begin to appreciate all kinds of nuances, studying textures, where the light falls on things.”

Now 65, Kooser is cancer-free. His new book, Delights & Shadows, is receiving critical raves. But it’s this U.S. poet laureate gig that has him fired up.

Ted Kooser wants to bring poetry back to the masses.

A mission

The farmhouse Kooser shares with his wife — Lincoln Journal Star editor Kathy Rutledge — has big rooms, clean lines, modern appliances. It was built on the site of a too-small “old bachelor farmhouse,” but the couple kept the original porch.

It’s a chill fall day. With Nebraska’s cornfields shrouded in silver mist, it’s a fine day to be indoors.

Kooser’s dogs, Howard the yellow Lab and Border collie Alice, shamble around the living room, looking for attention — but his eye is on that ladder.

He wants to retrieve a book he’s been talking about. He zips up the rungs with no trace of weakness from his illness.

He’s going to need that kind of energy in 2005.

In early October, Kooser took over as the “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.” It’s a flexible job. Kooser’s predecessor, Louise Glück, made it clear she wasn’t going to be as visible as her predecessor, Billy Collins, who had spent his two one-year terms (2001-03) as a roving ambassador for poetry.

Kooser, though, is taking Collins for his model. That means readings around the country, spreading poetry like gospel. And Kooser doesn’t fly — not because he’s afraid, he says, but because he feels intense discomfort on airplanes. He prefers to drive, which means he’ll log thousands of miles next year.

But the longest mile may be persuading America that poetry still matters — that it doesn’t have to be “hard.” He says the education system is partly to blame for that perception. For decades, educators emphasized material such as “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot’s poem-as-scholarly-cathedral. Many teachers seemed bent on convincing students that poetic merit equaled vexation.

“One of the things we did wrong for many years (was that the) poem was presented as a problem, like an algebraic equation. And you had to find the one answer to that poem. That would discourage anybody from enjoying poetry in adult life. What kind of pleasure can you take in that?”

In his printed words, Kooser lives by those spoken ones. Most of his poems are short, direct. And he’s not afraid to use humor, as in “The Necktie.” In six lines, Kooser gently tweaks the modern man for the silly practice of fastening silk around his neck as a sort of corporate armor, standing “at the mirror/dressing for work, waving hello/to himself with both hands.”

It helps, too, that Kooser is the first U.S. poet laureate from the Great Plains, as Librarian of Congress James H. Billington noted in making the appointment. He called Kooser “a major poetic voice for rural and small-town America.” You don’t have to be an East Coast academician or an Eliot scholar to relate to him.

And when Kooser talks about bringing poetry to the people, he enthuses about other poets’ work. His is not a vanity trip.

“Joe Hutchison’s a poet in Denver, runs a bookstore out there, not well-known, unfortunately,” Kooser says. “But I use (a poem of his) a lot in talking to people. He has a one-line poem called ‘Artichoke,’ and it goes, ‘O heart weighed down by so many wings.’

“How could you ever look at an artichoke again, in a grocery, without seeing that? That’s the kind of thing you can do for people. They’ll walk through the grocery with a little spark of recognition. (With poetry,) people’s lives all of a sudden are brighter and richer and more interesting.”

Natural avenues

Much of Kooser’s inspiration comes from his rural surroundings. His farmhouse stands on 62 acres. On his walks, Kooser can see deer, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, even a badger now and then — “not that you really want to, especially when you’re out with the dogs, because the dogs are not smart about badgers.”

This open but creature-haunted landscape fuels poems such as “A Winter Morning,” in which Kooser describes the light from a farmhouse window speaking “to the darkness in a small, sure voice.”

“Against this stillness, only a kettle’s whisper,” he writes. “And against the starry cold, one small blue ring of flame.” Human or animal, the denizens of his poems find some sort of unity with their world.

After a lot of sweat and toil, that is, on the part of their creator.

“It’s not unusual for a poem of 12 lines to go through 30, 40 versions before I’m done with it.”

In other words, it’s like ham cubes. Kooser, grinning, explains that grocery stores used to sell ham cubes with the plastic stretched over a gob of cubes piled on a flat piece of Styrofoam. Now they leave the Styrofoam out, and somehow shrink-wrap the plastic very closely over the cubes.

Poetry, he says, should be like that new package: “If you write a sonnet and you’ve got too much grocery-store air in there and not enough ham, it isn’t going to work.”

Or maybe poetry is like the method he uses to trim trees. Kooser doesn’t hunt much anymore; he doesn’t like the noise and has grown tired of killing. But firearms still come in handy: “I use my shotguns now for trimming trees. If I get a limb I can’t reach with a ladder, I go out there with half a box of shells and shoot it off.” Not bad, and it’s a lot like his multiple revisions — if you’re working on a stubborn poem, just keep blasting away at it.

But if Kooser has one disquieting thought about being poet laureate, it is that his duties will take him away from home, hearth and pen. He offers a rueful smile. “I’m not going to get much writing done this year, I’ll tell you that.”

No, he’ll be helping teachers teach poetry and persuading librarians to keep it in mind when making recommendations in the stacks and reading his own verse on his tour stops.

He’ll also try to get poetry back into newsprint. With the exception of this one, The New York Times Book Review on occasion and Washington Post Book World, the nation’s papers have all but abandoned publishing poems.

“Poetry was in newspapers for 150 years before we started taking it out of them, and I think modernism had something to do with that.” In other words, it’s that poetry-as-vexation thing again.

He’s working on a plan he hopes will offer smaller papers around the country a syndicated package of short, clear poems to be used wherever and whenever they have the space.

Humbled by fate

Kooser smiles easily these days, and the eyes behind his glasses gleam when he talks about his life and his work. There’s a contented modesty in his demeanor, not a shred of it false. But then, the last few years have thrown him some humbling situations — starting with the cancer.

“You sit in those oncology waiting rooms, and you may have walked in there as a smart-ass … but (you realize) you and everybody else are complete equals in that situation.”

Not that this man ever was encouraged to put on airs. Born in 1939 in Ames, Iowa, he grew up in the Hawkeye State, went to college there, then went to graduate school in Nebraska. He’s lived there since the 1960s, working most of that time for a couple of insurance companies. All his life, he has been shaped by a middle-class, Midwestern upbringing.

“My dad was the manager of a department store; my mother was a homemaker — pretty traditional, you know. I suppose there are things about my personality that are a result of my upbringing. I was taught not to put myself forward, that sort of thing.

“Matter of fact — and this is very typically Midwestern, I think — the minute I got this phone call about being appointed poet laureate, the first thing I started thinking was of all the reasons it shouldn’t be me. That’s the way we are out here, you know. … I was just completely staggered by it.

“And I’m still surprised. It’s not something I imagined would ever happen to me. But it’s certainly a great honor, and I’m delighted to have it.

“And I’m really throwing myself into trying to do some good with it.”