Ted Kooser
*** This story appeared in the Bristol Herald Courier on Wednesday, Mar 12, 2008. ***
EMORY, Va. - Ted Kooser can describe the rainbow in a pan of dishwater and the diving porpoise in a notebook's spiral binding.
He says he looks for the beauty in ordinary objects.
"I am drawn to try to write about the ordinary world because I think really that there's some magic to be found in just about everything if you look at it closely," Kooser said Tuesday, before he spoke at Emory & Henry College about his two years as U.S. poet laureate.
An example: a poem titled "A Spiral Notebook," which is included in his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry book "Delights and Shadows."
"In a town as big as Emory, there are probably several thousand spiral notebooks lying around," he said. "Here's something right under your nose that can be looked at as sort of remarkable."
Kooser said he grew up in a small, rural Iowa community full of regular people ? the kind of people he likes most. Many of his poems - plain-spoken verse with rural roots - are written for average folks.
Reading his poetry here Tuesday night, he said he had a feeling "there were people like that there."
Emory & Henry College President Rosalind Reichard said she thought at least a third of the audience was made up of people from the community ? not the college.
Kooser says he's still more comfortable in rural places than in big cities, and he says that nearing 70, he feels he's now his grandparents.
"It's the sort of place that's quite beautiful if you look at it closely," he says of the acreage in Nebraska where he lives now. "But if you were driving through, you wouldn't notice it at all."
Now retired, Kooser worked for 35 years in the insurance business, writing in the early morning before work.
"I never deluded myself into thinking there was a way of making a living as a writer," Kooser said. "I would say there are no poets in this country who can live on the income from their poems alone."
His advice to aspiring poets ? read.
"That's not just reading poetry, that's reading everything," he said. "That's how you learn to write, is by reading."
Also, he cautioned, "I think it's important for people not to take themselves too seriously. ... There are lots and lots of people in the literary world that take themselves way too seriously."
He says to be a good writer, a person must be true to himself.
Asked about his favorite poem, he immediately recalled a metaphor written by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer: "The light dissolved like a tablet in a glass of darkness," he recited from a poem called "The Couple."
And his favorite poem that he has written? "Screech Owl," which describes the tiny bird calling out in the night.
"It's about human hope, among other things," he said. "I like it also because it's short. It's small the way a screech owl is."
As for how to see such beauty, "You put the past away, and you put the future away, and there you are in the present," Kooser said. "And then you notice the things that are in the present without all that other baggage getting in the way."
