KOOSER, Ted

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Nationality: American. Born: Theodore Kooser, Ames, Iowa, 25 April 1939. Education: Iowa State University, Ames, B.S. 1962; University of Nebraska, Lincoln, M.A. in English 1968. Family: Married 1) Diana Tressler in 1962 (divorced 1969), one son; 2) Kathleen Rutledge in 1977. Career: High school teacher, Madrid, Iowa, 1962–63; correspondent, 1964–65, and underwriter, 1965–73, Bankers Life Nebraska, Lincoln; senior underwriter, 1973–84, and vice president, 1984–98, Lincoln Benefit Life. Since 1970 part-time instructor and visiting professor in creative writing, University of Nebraska. Since 1967 publisher, Windflower Press. Awards: Prairie Schooner prize, 1975, 1978; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1976, 1984; Society for Midland Author's poetry award, 1980; Stanley Kunitz prize, 1984; Governor's Art award, 1988; Richard Hugo prize, 1994. Address: 1820 Branched Oak Road, Garland, Nebraska 68360, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Official Entry Blank. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1969.

Grass County. Lincoln, Nebraska, Windflower Press, 1971.

Twenty Poems. Crete, Nebraska, Best Cellar Press, 1973.

A Local Habitation, and A Name. San Luis Obispo, California, Solo Press, 1974.

Shooting a Farmhouse; So This Is Nebraska. Denver, Ally Press, 1975.

Not Coming to Be Barked At. Milwaukee, Pentagram Press, 1976.

Hatcher. Lincoln, Nebraska, Windflower Press, 1978.

Old Marriage and New. Austin, Texas, Cold Mountain Press, 1978.

Cottonwood County, with William Kloeflkorn. Lincoln, Nebraska, Windflower Press, 1979.

Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.

One World at a Time. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985.

The Blizzard Voices. St. Paul, Minnesota, Bieler Press, 1986.

Weather Central. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.

A Book of Things. Lincoln, Nebraska, Lyra Press, 1995.

A Decade of Ted Kooser Valentines. Omaha, Nebraska, Penumbra Press, 1996.

Winter Morning Walks: 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison. Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001.

Other

Editor, The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry. Lincoln, Nebraska, Windflower Press, 1980.

Editor, As Far As I Can See; Contemporary Writers of the Middle Plains. Lincoln, Nebraska, Windflower Press, 1989.

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Critical Studies: In Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture by Dana Gioia, St. Paul, Minnesota, Gray wolf Press, 1992; by Tom Hansen, in North Dakota Quarterly, 61(3), Summer 1993; by Jean Johnson, in Poet Lore, 90(1), Spring 1995.

Ted Kooser comments:

(1995) I have been writing poetry for thirty-five years. For the first fifteen of those years I was trying to get through to myself, and for the last twenty I have been trying to get through to my readers. Looking back over my poems of all those years, I can see my work becoming more and more accessible to a reader whose interests are more general than literary. I would like to be a popular poet without having to compromise my artistic standards to any degree, and that is a difficult task. I like nothing so much as to have letters of praise from people who ordinarily do not read poetry, and I am also very pleased when my work gets included in anthologies for use in the public school classroom. I feel like a useful person when I can contribute something to the lives of people who may be otherwise intimidated by art and artists. My poems are very often centered about single figures of speech, conceits, and I like to provide people with these new ways of seeing the associations between things. Several years ago, after reading a poem of mine in which I describe a little family of mice moving their nest up out of a field at spring plowing time, someone wrote me to say that he would never again look at a freshly plowed field in the same way. That was the highest compliment I have ever been paid, and my goal as a poet is to offer those moments to others for as long as I am able to.

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Ted Kooser is a genuinely popular poet. This is not to say that he commands a mass public. No contemporary poet does, at least not in America. Kooser is popular in that, unlike most of his peers, he writes naturally for a nonliterary public. His style is accomplished but extremely simple, his diction drawn from common speech, his syntax conversational. His subjects are chosen from the everyday world of the Great Plains, and his sensibility, though more subtle and articulate, is that of the average Midwesterner. He never makes an allusion that an intelligent but unbookish reader will not immediately grasp. There is to my knowledge no poet of equal stature who writes so convincingly in a manner the average American can understand and appreciate.

But to describe Kooser merely as a poet who writes plainly about the ordinary world is misleading insofar as it makes his work sound dull. For here, too, the comparison with popular art holds true. Kooser's work is uncommonly entertaining. His poems are usually short and perfectly paced; his subjects, relevant and engaging. Finishing one poem, the reader instinctively wants to proceed to another. It has been Kooser's particular genius to develop a genuine poetic style that accommodates the average reader and that portrays a vision providing unexpected moments of illuminations from the seemingly threadbare details of everyday life.

If Kooser's work is visionary, however, it is on a decidedly human scale. He offers no blinding flashes of inspiration, no mystic moments of transcendence. He creates no private mythologies or fantasy worlds. Instead he provides small but genuine insights into the world of everyday experience. His work strikes the difficult balance between profundity and accessibility, just as his style manages to be distinctively personal without being idiosyncratic. It is simple without becoming shallow, striking without going to extremes. He has achieved the most difficult kind of originality. He has transformed the common idiom and experience into fresh and distinctive poetry.

Kooser does have significant limitations as a poet. Looking across his mature work, one sees a narrow range of technical means, an avoidance of stylistic or thematic complexity, little interest in ideas, and an unwillingness to work in longer forms. In his weaker poems one sometimes notices a tendency to sentimentalize his subjects and too strong a need to be liked by his readers, which often expresses itself in a self-deprecatory attitude toward himself and his poetry. In short, Kooser's major limitation is a deep-seated conservatism that keeps him working in areas he knows he can master and that please his audience.

Significantly, however, Kooser's limitations derive directly from his strengths. His narrow technical range reflects his insistence on perfecting the forms he uses. If Kooser has concentrated on a few types of poems, he has made each of these forms unmistakably his own. If he has avoided longer forms, what member of his generation has written so many unforgettable short poems? If he has avoided complexity in his work, he has also developed a distinctive and highly-charged kind of simplicity. What his poems lack in intellectuality they more than make up for in concrete detail. If he occasionally lapses into sentimentality, it is because he invests his poems with real emotion. Even Kooser's self-deprecatory manner betrays a consistent concern for the communal role of the poet. He will not strike superior bardic poses to bully or impress his audience.

Kooser has written more perfect poems than any American poet of his generation. In a quiet way he is also one of its most original poets. His technical and intellectual interests may be narrow (indeed in terms of limited techniques he shares a common fault of his generation), but his work shows an impressive emotional range all handled in a distinctively personal way. Finally, his work does coalesce into an impressive whole. Read individually, his poems sparkle with insight. Read together, they provide one of the few broad and believable portraits of contemporary America in our poetry.

—Dana Gioia