Kooser speaks about poetry, writing process at library

Ted Kooser writes every day. He gets up at 4:30 a.m. and writes until about 7 a.m. His output starts with a journal entry, chronicling the previous day, and then he works on poems.

Kooser, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and resident of Garland, led a conversation about writing at the Seward Memorial Library Sept. 23.

“If I’m good, it’s because I have done it every day for 60 years,” Kooser said. “The mind is working, even when the hand isn’t.”

Kooser said much of his writing involves going back and forth in time. He writes at home but also has an office in Dwight, which he uses as an extra library for his poetry books and as an art studio.

He said his poems usually start with some kind of metaphor, rarely with an idea. The poem he shared during the afternoon was one he’d finished that morning about smart phones and the murals in Morrill Hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

An audience member asked about silencing one’s inner critic, and Kooser shared a quote from William Stafford who said one should lower one’s standards.

“You want to write something great and you can’t,” he said. “About twice a month I have something worthwhile. The rest is exercise, calisthenics.”

Writing every day is important, he said.

“You need to concentrate on what’s in front of you and not worry about what’s next,” he said.

He said having a good reader to look at his work is important. His wife Kathleen Rutledge is his reader.

“You need someone who will tell you the truth,” he said.

When it comes to revising, Kooser said, some poems go through 40 or 50 changes. Some are as minor as adding a comma, and he keeps some of the drafts to see the evolution of the piece.

“Often I revise beyond the point I should have,” he said, and having the previous drafts allows him to go back to an earlier version more easily.

He said he uses line breaks to create a field of energy at the end of the lines in his poems.

“The last thing you want in a poem is for the reader to become conscious of the surface of the page,” he said.

When it’s time to revise, he tries to step back far enough that it seems like someone else’s work.

“I could spend 100 hours to look like I spent a half hour,” he said.

Kooser said he loves to write description and writes for imaginary readers, like his mother.

“I’m not interested in writing for professional literary people,” he said.

Kooser served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006.

Kooser received a phone call from Prosser Gifford, the director of scholarly programs at the Library of Congress, one afternoon in 2004, offering the position.

“I was completely staggered by this,” he said. “I couldn’t speak. He offered to call back tomorrow.”

While it was a wonderful experience, he said, it was

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hard on him and Rutledge. He spoke at meetings all around the country and took every opportunity to visit libraries to look at their poetry collections.

“It was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down,” he said. “I was the only person from this part of the country, and I thought I’d better show them and do it better than anyone else.”

While in Maine, Kooser had the opportunity to visit E.B. White’s farm. White is one of Kooser’s favorite authors, and he got to go into the barn where Charlotte’s Web was set.

He and his sister grew up in Ames, Iowa, the children of a department store manager. Kooser described his dad and sister as garrulous and his mother and himself as more introverted.

“We had books but not many,” he said. “I was a regular at the public library.”

His first job was creating library posters to announce its events.

Brushes with the famous started early for Kooser. He lived down the street from Nick Nolte, who went on to become an actor, and Bob Bartley, who was the editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal. Eddie Mezvinsky was his neighbor and became a congressman who sat on President Richard Nixon’s impeachment panel. He was later convicted on charges of bank fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud. Eddie’s son Marc is married to Chelsea Clinton.

Kooser also knew a man named Tom Jackman who was half African American, half Native American. He was born a slave in Missouri in 1868.

After college, Kooser taught English for a year but didn’t like it.

“I wanted to be a writer,” he said.

He took a job in an insurance firm and worked in insurance for the next 35 years, retiring at age 60.

“Writing is my vocation. Insurance was an avocation,” he said.

scroston@sewardindependent.com