Poetry in motion U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser brings his literary form to the masses

Geezer. That might be your first thought upon meeting Ted Kooser. He looks a little like Ross Perot (the ears) and a little like your uncle (the unshaven one). He was born in 1939 in Iowa and lives in Nebraska. He wears a brightly colored, plaid, short-sleeved shirt and wire-rim glasses. Sometimes he wears overalls. All of which add up, undeniably, to geezer.

But get Kooser talking about poetry and you’ll realize why he’s in a second term as poet laureate of the United States, a position appointed annually by the Library of Congress. One of his first moves in the post was to attend a meeting of the National Council of English Teachers, a powerful force when it comes to spreading the gospel of poetry. As a regular speaker at Rotary clubs, he mingles as easily with non-poets as with academics and professional writers. In his first term as poet laureate, Kooser inaugurated the program “American Life in Poetry,” a free weekly newspaper column that introduces short works by living U.S. poets.

Kooser’s own work is accessible and imagistic, qualities that engage even the least experienced reader of the genre. Yet he appeals to the literati, too: His 2004 collection “Delights and Shadows” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

“I really like the fact that I’m connecting with a lot of people, that my laureateship seems to be going very well,” said Kooser, sitting on a deck last week at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle. “Invariably, some man comes up to me after a reading and says he will give poetry a try now. Inch by inch, I’m making a difference, and I like that. I get to talk to a lot of people who don’t read poetry.”

As one of four visiting artists at Haystack this summer, Kooser spent mornings on his own work and afternoons talking with students and faculty, in addition to holding daily writing workshops. The workshops, which lasted an hour and took place at the end of the workday, were held at the school’s new visiting artist studio, a vaulting wooden building in a forest setting. Artist faculty members, who teach full sessions at Haystack, have their own quarters. But this space is reserved for guest artists to hold workshops, meet with crafts artists and create new work during two-week residencies. For the last few years, Haystack has collaborated with the Deer Isle Jazz Festival at the Stonington Opera House to place a musician in one of the four slots. Nicole Mitchell, a jazz flutist, will be the next in residence at the studio this month. Another writer, Ralph Caplan, will be in residence in August.

“The series introduces students and faculty to other ways of looking at things,” said Stuart Kestenbaum, Haystack’s director. “It also informs artists about the ways people work in the craft area. So it’s a cross-fertilization. We want people to be surprised at what they are seeing, both the students and the visiting artists. The new space gives us more options for how we can do that.”

For Kooser, the time at Haystack has also been a respite from the busy life of being poet laureate. From his home base in Nebraska, he hits the road several days a week, speaking to civic groups, teaching workshops, delivering convocation speeches, meeting with educators and students, attending conferences around the country. Late last week, he headed to a college outside of New York City for another engagement. In the fall, he will resume his missionarylike work by attending a national convention for English teachers.

Kooser may seem as driven as anyone with a full-time career. In fact, he is retired. In 1999, at the age of 60 and in the throes of fourth-stage cancer, Kooser resigned from a long career in the insurance business. He beat the cancer, and, at the same time, continued his early morning writing, a habit that has produced 10 books. He still does the morning sessions – even at Haystack, where he was up early enough to greet the breakfast cooks coming to work each day. Otherwise, he said, he spends time “like any other geezer,” doing chores and taking care of his property in rural Garland, Neb., where he lives with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, editor of the Lincoln Journal Star.

As the first poet laureate to hail from the Great Plains, Kooser is a cheerleader for small-town America and felt at home watching the July 4th parade on Deer Isle. “I’ve been to tractor pulls, farm auctions and county fairs,” he said. “It’s so deeply engrained in our culture – the vitality of small towns.”

While his roots are working-class and his poetry captures the commonplace, Kooser is sometimes compared to Wallace Stevens, another American poet who worked as an insurance agent. But the insurance gig is as far as the comparison goes. If Kooser bears similarity to another poet, it’s William Carlos Williams, a pediatrician who wrote about wheelbarrows and fresh strawberries. (Williams was appointed poet laureate in 1952, but did not serve.)

Keeping poems accessible is vital to Kooser’s philosophy. (He used to slip new poems to his secretary in the insurance office; if she had no questions, he considered the pieces successful.) Nevertheless, many consider poetry an indecipherable form of writing, said Kooser. Most people have the notion that if they want to follow along, they have to be extremely learned. “Right away, you exclude readers,” said Kooser. “I like, as Williams said, a poetry dogs and cats can read. I work pretty hard at that. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s that I detest elitism.”

Kooser is not only a survivor; he has also become, as the Library of Congress requires of the poet laureate, a “lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans.”

The added benefit of “raising the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry” is that Kooser has also shed his lifelong tendency toward shyness. Now he speaks in front of thousands of people and craves even larger audiences. “He’s very personable,” said Kestenbaum, who is also a poet. “He has a great sense of the audience responding to his work. We want our visiting artists to be a part of our community. And Ted engaged people all the time – at meals, in conversation. He made himself very available.”

“I decided that this is what I’m going to do for a couple of years,” said Kooser, “and I put everything else aside. It will all be over, and then I’ll be the ‘former’ poet laureate.”

Perhaps then he can go back to being simply a geezer, but he will have shown – as he likes to say about poetry – “that there is a kind of magic in the ordinary.”