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One World at a Time
Poems portray nature, the past, death, memories, the night, space exploration, the poor, city life, and health
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1985
11 people want to read
About the author
Ted Kooser
100 books300 followersTed Kooser lives in rural Nebraska with his wife, Kathleen, and three dogs. He is one of America's most noted poets, having served two terms as U. S. Poet Laureate and, during the second term, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection, Delights & Shadows. He is a retired life insurance executive who now teaches part-time at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. The school board in Lincoln, Nebraska, recently opened Ted Kooser Elementary School, which Ted says is his greatest honor, among many awards and distinctions. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three nonfiction books. Two of the latter are books on writing, The Poetry Home Repair Manual and Writing Brave and Free, and a memoir, Lights on a Ground of Darkness (all from University of Nebraska Press. Bag in the Wind from Candlewick is his first children's book, with which he is delighted. "It's wonderful," Ted said, "to be writing for young people. I am reinventing myself at age 70."
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 21, 2025
Kooser's poetry is always among the first I recommend to people new to poetry. Though his poetry hasn't varied much throughout his career, it doesn't really have to. He has a knack for unpretentious observation as metaphor, a making-magical of the mundane. Maybe it's unfair to call the Midwest, my home and his, mundane, but it's at least quiet and isolating, two things which most people abhor.
Immediately before reading this short collection, I was skimming through a book about Neruda and ekphrastic poetry. The more I think about it, you could almost call Kooser an ekphrastic poet, because he rarely writes in the abstract; all of his poems democratize (or deify) daily life as worthy of art, and thus in a roundabout sense he writes ekphrasis. He approaches the common barn or the broken down fence with the same reverence as many approach art galleries.
This brings up an important question, however: is he cynically using everything as raw material, i.e. as a resource to exploit, or is he imbuing into average, overlooked things a transcendence which has been lost? Because he has never really veered outside of his style, I'm tempted to say the first, but because he's an honest Midwesterner, I'm also inclined to the latter. Many contemporary poets have cheap tricks like verbing nouns and nouning verbs, but Kooser sticks to a straightforward metaphorization and occasional anthropomorphizing of “things.” He’s too Midwest, that is, too honest to do such a cheap trick as playing with parts of speech for shock value.
I might describe what he does as enchanted summary, a re-mythologization of average things which modernity has wrung the interest out of, since we’re so preoccupied with flashy media that’s been pornographized. This doesn’t mean Kooser is his own sort of pornographer, he never stoops to such exoticization; the way he transforms raw material is more in the direction of cheesy sentimentalism, almost always successfully stopping short of kitsch. His poems have the aftertaste of a thrift store decoration aisle, though they have the initial taste of haiku and imagism.
The one thing I can't stand is Midwest sterility, the cold, off-white pathological cleanliness that afflicts upper-middle class houses in the Midwest and makes them unbearably ugly; what Kooser and I gravitate toward instead is the same semi-poverty aesthetic of run-down incidentals and back alleys that WCW focused on in his “Pastoral” poems. But instead of merely commenting on the objects themselves, Kooser always couches them in contexts, especially that of nature (especially seasons, precipitation, etc.) and of man (anthropomorphizing, ennobling, etc.). What we get as a result is something with the wholesomeness of Kobayashi Issa and the aesthetic sensibilities of a barnyard cat; in other words, something legitimately proletarian and accessible.
Immediately before reading this short collection, I was skimming through a book about Neruda and ekphrastic poetry. The more I think about it, you could almost call Kooser an ekphrastic poet, because he rarely writes in the abstract; all of his poems democratize (or deify) daily life as worthy of art, and thus in a roundabout sense he writes ekphrasis. He approaches the common barn or the broken down fence with the same reverence as many approach art galleries.
This brings up an important question, however: is he cynically using everything as raw material, i.e. as a resource to exploit, or is he imbuing into average, overlooked things a transcendence which has been lost? Because he has never really veered outside of his style, I'm tempted to say the first, but because he's an honest Midwesterner, I'm also inclined to the latter. Many contemporary poets have cheap tricks like verbing nouns and nouning verbs, but Kooser sticks to a straightforward metaphorization and occasional anthropomorphizing of “things.” He’s too Midwest, that is, too honest to do such a cheap trick as playing with parts of speech for shock value.
I might describe what he does as enchanted summary, a re-mythologization of average things which modernity has wrung the interest out of, since we’re so preoccupied with flashy media that’s been pornographized. This doesn’t mean Kooser is his own sort of pornographer, he never stoops to such exoticization; the way he transforms raw material is more in the direction of cheesy sentimentalism, almost always successfully stopping short of kitsch. His poems have the aftertaste of a thrift store decoration aisle, though they have the initial taste of haiku and imagism.
The one thing I can't stand is Midwest sterility, the cold, off-white pathological cleanliness that afflicts upper-middle class houses in the Midwest and makes them unbearably ugly; what Kooser and I gravitate toward instead is the same semi-poverty aesthetic of run-down incidentals and back alleys that WCW focused on in his “Pastoral” poems. But instead of merely commenting on the objects themselves, Kooser always couches them in contexts, especially that of nature (especially seasons, precipitation, etc.) and of man (anthropomorphizing, ennobling, etc.). What we get as a result is something with the wholesomeness of Kobayashi Issa and the aesthetic sensibilities of a barnyard cat; in other words, something legitimately proletarian and accessible.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews