Poet as regular guy

Modest to a fault, short and wiry in a dark brown tweed jacket about a size too big, he looks more like a retired insurance executive from Nebraska than the poet laureate of the United States. Which, he is quick to point out, is not as big a deal as it might sound. The head of the Library of Congress makes the appointment after receiving suggestions from lots of people in the poetry world. The lucky writer gets a small stipend, not enough to live on, and gives a lot of readings to groups like the one last week at Venison University in central Swingstate.

His name is Ted Kooser, and chances are you haven't heard of him. Poets are not rock stars, and the anecdotal evidence flies out of him like quail flushed from a field. He's been sober for 20 years; he had a strict upbringing in small-town Nebraska; his people are from northeastern Iowa. He didn't fit the profile of academic literary circles in his younger days, and he still doesn't. He's more Sandburg than Eliot, more Frost than Pound, more Snyder than Ginsburg, and more Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams than any of them, because he made a living in the insurance business and wrote poems on the side. He's here in Ohio to celebrate the ordinary.

A Poetry Reading

Once you were young along a river, tree to tree,
with sleek black wings and red shoulders.
You sang for yourself but all of them listened to you.

Now you're an old blue heron with yellow eyes
and a gray neck tough as a snake.
You open your book on its spine, a split fish,
and pick over the difficult ribs,
turning your better eye down to the work
of eating your words as you go.

(from Weather Central, 1994)

Let me set the stage. A lecture hall in the student center with a decent turnout of faculty, students, and my Wednesday night men's group, eight gray heads in the second row who piled in a van to navigate the freezing fog to Granville. The set-up man's set-up man is beaming from the podium, also in a dark brown tweed and a fast receding crew cut. Chair of the English Department? I bet he played point guard in prep school. The set-up man himself, a year or two younger and leaner, also sports a crew cut, but I'm judging the book by its cover. He goes on a bit about the ostentacious young poet he once was before encountering Kooser in the stacks and changing his tune. Now he's a tenured critic with a Guggenheim grant and a big black pickup truck.

I got a chance to talk with Kooser briefly at the reception afterward. He writes everything longhand with a fountain pen on an unlined artist's sketchpad. He only goes through four a year because he writes small so a lot of words fit on a page. He edits himself severely, cutting and cutting and revising, then transcribing what's left on a word processor to see how the lines look in print. He gestures with both hands to indicate even margins, doesn't like any long lines hanging out.

Kooser writes to be read and understood by people who are not necessarily schooled in verse. His secretary had the privilege of reading much of his work before anyone else; if she didn't get it, he knew he was missing the mark. He writes every day. He said his uncle was a champion at horseshoes, so young Ted asked him how he got so good. "You got to pitch a hundred shoes a day," he said.