Post by jeannerené on Jun 2, 2007 22:31:47 GMT -8
Ted Kooser... 13th U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
Picture from Website:
www.tedkooser.com/
I was browsing ... and came up with the idea (hopefully having time) of posting topics on Poet Laureates from around the world. Although Ted Kooser is not the present U.S. Laureate (that honor is currently held by Donald Hall) ... I became enchanted with his poetry and simply had to post his work first. His work is so "downhome" ... direct, honest, timely and captures an American voice that has served as a foundation throughout our history.
The bio after his poetry/prose is just a tad bit dated, but of all that I read held the most information.
*****
Porch Swing in September
by Ted Kooser
The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it’s time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.
From Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, by Ted Kooser, © 2005.
****
A Happy Birthday
by Ted Kooser
This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.
From Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser. Copyright © 2004 .
****
Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.
From Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser. Copyright 2004 .
****
Father
Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day—the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.
from Delights & Shadows, by Ted Kooser. Copyright 2004.
****
from LOCAL WONDERS
by Ted Kooser
Today I put on a cowboy shirt my mother made for me when I was fourteen. It still fits, though the style is quaint. It's red with a white yoke and white cuffs, and the yoke and cuffs are embroidered with plump green cacti. It's the kind of shirt Roy Rogers wore for the Saturday matinees when I was a boy. Long ago I lost my long-barreled pearl-handled cap pistols and wore out the boots with the stars.
Mother made most of our clothes when my sister and I were small, and nearly all of her own. One of the most difficult moments we faced after she died was carrying armloads of her handmade suits and jackets and skirts into a charity thrift shop. And then turning our backs on them. I kept her black Singer with its strap of green felt around the neck, with pins and needles waiting and ready. And the sewing basket my Grandfather Kooser bought for her at an auction when I was a baby.
Mother was working as a salesgirl when she met my father, but when they were married, she became a full-time homemaker and never went back to salaried work. My father was never a highly paid man, and in dime store spiral notebooks, she kept track of every cent they spent from 1936 till the day she died. The hospital bill, ten days for Mother and me when I was born, was $47.38.
For almost twenty years after my father was gone, she lived alone in their house. With the taste for frugality she'd learned in the Great Depression, she saved what she could from Dad's modest pension and her own small social security checks. She invested in CDs, watching the newspaper to catch the best rates, and slowly amassed nearly a half million dollars, far more than the sum of my father's income for all the years he'd worked. I asked her one day if she ever went out to eat, and she said, "Yes, when Colonel Sanders has that two-piece chicken special, I'll pick one up. Then I eat one piece that day and the other piece the next." Even with all that money in the bank, she liked to see if she could talk her doctors out of free samples of prescription drugs.
Perhaps fifteen years ago I was visiting with her long distance, and she told me she'd just finished another crazy quilt. She made about ten of these, handsome, featherstitched along the patches but not quilted, tied instead, like comforters. She made them from garage sale fabric scraps. She told me that because she'd already given a quilt to each member of our family, she didn't know what to do with this one. I asked her how much she had in it, and without a pause she said, "Twelve dollars and forty-three cents." I said, "Why don't you figure out how much you'd like to have for it, maybe seventy-five or a hundred dollars, and I'll buy it from you."
"Why would you do that?" she asked.
I told her I had an old girlfriend who had recently been married and I hadn't yet given her a wedding gift. Mother paused for no more than a breath and then said, "Ted, that's too much to give to an old girlfriend." And she wouldn't let me buy the quilt. I didn't argue. The Bohemians say, "Never blow in a bear's ear."
From Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps Copyright © 2002 by Ted Kooser
****
AT THE OFFICE EARLY
by Ted Kooser
Rain has beaded the panes
of my office windows,
and in each little lens
the bank at the corner
hangs upside down.
What wonderful music
this rain must have made
in the night, a thousand banks
turned over, the change
crashing out of the drawers
and bouncing upstairs
to the roof, the soft
percussion of the ferns
dropping out of their pots,
the ballpoint pens
popping out of their sockets
in a fluffy snow
of deposit slips.
Now all day long,
as the sun dries the glass,
I'll hear the soft piano
of banks righting themselves,
the underpaid tellers
counting their nickels and dimes.
From One World at a Time by Ted Kooser Copyright © 1985
****
So This Is Nebraska
by Ted Kooser
The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,
clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like
waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
From Flying at Night, by Ted Kooser copywrite 2005
****
Website:
www.tedkooser.com/
Bio quoted from official website:
Ted Kooser is one of Nebraska’s most highly regarded poets and the country’s newest Poet Laureate. A professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he is the author of eleven full-length collections of poetry, including Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004) and Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). Over the years his works have appeared in many periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. Koosers’ poems are included in textbooks and anthologies used in both secondary schools and college classrooms across the country. He has received two NEA fellowships in poetry, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, The James Boatwright Prize, and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council.
Kooser has read his poetry for The Academy of American Poets in New York City as well as for many university audiences including those of the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell at Ithaca, Case Western Reserve at Cleveland, The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He has conducted writing workshops in connection with many of these readings.
In addition to poetry, Kooser has written in a variety of forms including plays, fiction, personal essays, and literary criticism. His first book of prose, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003 and Third Place in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award in Nonfiction for 2002. The book was chosen as the Best Book Written by a Midwestern Writer for 2002 by Friends of American Writers. It also won the Gold Award for Autobiography in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. The University of Nebraska Press will publish his newest book The Poetry Home Repair Manual in January 2005. The book will give beginning poets tips for their writing.
Currently he is editor and publisher of Windflower Press which specializes in the publication of contemporary poetry. Though mostly inactive now, Windflower published a number of books as well as two literary magazines, The Salt Creek Reader (1967-1975) and The Blue Hotel (1980-1981). The Salt Creek Reader was awarded several grants of support from the National Endowment of the Arts through The Coordination Council of Literary Magazines. Kooser published several anthologies through Windflower Press. One of these, The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry, was listed by Library Journal as one of the best books from small presses for 1980. Seventeen Danish Poets in Translation received international notice, and As Far As I Can See; Contemporary Writing of the Middle Plains is in use as a text in secondary schools and colleges across the plains region. In 1999, Kooser published Roy Scheele's Keeping the Horses as a fundraising project for the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association.
Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Kooser earned a BS at Iowa State University in 1962 and an MA at the University of Nebraska in 1968. He is a former vice-president of the Lincoln Benefit Life, where he worked as an insurance representative for many years. He lives on an acreage near the town of Garland, Nebraska, with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, and dogs, Alice and Howard. He also has a son, Jeff, and a granddaughter, Margaret.
Books Published:
Poetry:
Official Entry Blank, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1969
A Local Habitation & A Name, Solo Press, San Luis Obispo, 1974
Not Coming to be Barked At, Pentagram Press, Milwaukee, 1976
Sure Signs, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980
One World at a Time, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985
The Blizzard Voices, Bieler Press, St. Paul, 1986
Weather Central, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
Winter Morning Walks; 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000.
Braided Creek, with Jim Harrison. Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
Delights and Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, 2004.
Flying at Night, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
Nonfiction:
Local Wonders; Seasons in the Bohemian Alps. University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
The Poetry Home Repair Manual. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Chapbooks and Special Editions:
Grass County, privately printed, 1971
Twenty Poems, Best Cellar Press, Crete, NE, 1973
Shooting a Farmhouse/So This is Nebraska, Ally Press, St. Paul, 1975
Voyages to the Inland Sea, with Harley Elliott, Center for Contemporary
Poetry, LaCrosse, WI, 1976
Old Marriage and New, Cold Mountain Press, Austin, TX, 1978
Cottonwood County, with William Kloefkorn, Windflower Press, 1979
Etudes, Bits Press, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1992
A Book of Things, Lyra Press, Lincoln, 1995.
A Decade of Ted Kooser Valentines, Penumbra Press, Omaha, 1996
Lights on a Ground of Darkness, University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Awards:
Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry, 1976 and 1978
Writing Fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts, 1976 and 1984
Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, 1980
Stanley Kunitz Poetry Prize, Columbia Magazine, 1984
Pushcart Prize, 1984
Governor's Art Award, 1988
Mayor's Art Award, 1989
Richard Hugo Prize, Poetry Northwest, 1994.
James Boatwright Award, Shenandoah, 2000
Nebraska Arts Council Merit Award in Poetry, 2000
Mari Sandoz Award, Nebraska Library Association, 2000
Nebraska Book Award for poetry, 2001
Barnes & Noble Discover Nonfiction Prize, third place, 2003
Friends of American Writers Prize, 2003
Honorable Mention, Society of Midland Authors nonfiction prize, 2003
First place, ForeWord Magazine autobiographical writing competition, 2003
The Best American Poetry, 2003
Nebraska Book Award for nonfiction, 2003
Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize (with Jim Harrison), 2004
United States Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry, 2004
Pulitzer Prize for poetry (Delights and Shadows), 2005 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, 2005
Best American Essays, 2005
Pushcart Prize, 2005
*********************************************
On-Line sources used:
-> Poets.org
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1269
-> Ted Kooser
www.tedkooser.com/index.html
->Nebraska Center for Writers
mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/kooser.htm
-> National Public Radio
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4965544
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I hope you enjoyed reading... please feel free to leave any comments or additional work by Ted Kooser you feel others would enjoy.
...jeanne...
Picture from Website:
www.tedkooser.com/
I was browsing ... and came up with the idea (hopefully having time) of posting topics on Poet Laureates from around the world. Although Ted Kooser is not the present U.S. Laureate (that honor is currently held by Donald Hall) ... I became enchanted with his poetry and simply had to post his work first. His work is so "downhome" ... direct, honest, timely and captures an American voice that has served as a foundation throughout our history.
The bio after his poetry/prose is just a tad bit dated, but of all that I read held the most information.
*****
Porch Swing in September
by Ted Kooser
The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it’s time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.
From Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, by Ted Kooser, © 2005.
****
A Happy Birthday
by Ted Kooser
This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.
From Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser. Copyright © 2004 .
****
Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.
From Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser. Copyright 2004 .
****
Father
Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day—the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.
from Delights & Shadows, by Ted Kooser. Copyright 2004.
****
from LOCAL WONDERS
by Ted Kooser
Today I put on a cowboy shirt my mother made for me when I was fourteen. It still fits, though the style is quaint. It's red with a white yoke and white cuffs, and the yoke and cuffs are embroidered with plump green cacti. It's the kind of shirt Roy Rogers wore for the Saturday matinees when I was a boy. Long ago I lost my long-barreled pearl-handled cap pistols and wore out the boots with the stars.
Mother made most of our clothes when my sister and I were small, and nearly all of her own. One of the most difficult moments we faced after she died was carrying armloads of her handmade suits and jackets and skirts into a charity thrift shop. And then turning our backs on them. I kept her black Singer with its strap of green felt around the neck, with pins and needles waiting and ready. And the sewing basket my Grandfather Kooser bought for her at an auction when I was a baby.
Mother was working as a salesgirl when she met my father, but when they were married, she became a full-time homemaker and never went back to salaried work. My father was never a highly paid man, and in dime store spiral notebooks, she kept track of every cent they spent from 1936 till the day she died. The hospital bill, ten days for Mother and me when I was born, was $47.38.
For almost twenty years after my father was gone, she lived alone in their house. With the taste for frugality she'd learned in the Great Depression, she saved what she could from Dad's modest pension and her own small social security checks. She invested in CDs, watching the newspaper to catch the best rates, and slowly amassed nearly a half million dollars, far more than the sum of my father's income for all the years he'd worked. I asked her one day if she ever went out to eat, and she said, "Yes, when Colonel Sanders has that two-piece chicken special, I'll pick one up. Then I eat one piece that day and the other piece the next." Even with all that money in the bank, she liked to see if she could talk her doctors out of free samples of prescription drugs.
Perhaps fifteen years ago I was visiting with her long distance, and she told me she'd just finished another crazy quilt. She made about ten of these, handsome, featherstitched along the patches but not quilted, tied instead, like comforters. She made them from garage sale fabric scraps. She told me that because she'd already given a quilt to each member of our family, she didn't know what to do with this one. I asked her how much she had in it, and without a pause she said, "Twelve dollars and forty-three cents." I said, "Why don't you figure out how much you'd like to have for it, maybe seventy-five or a hundred dollars, and I'll buy it from you."
"Why would you do that?" she asked.
I told her I had an old girlfriend who had recently been married and I hadn't yet given her a wedding gift. Mother paused for no more than a breath and then said, "Ted, that's too much to give to an old girlfriend." And she wouldn't let me buy the quilt. I didn't argue. The Bohemians say, "Never blow in a bear's ear."
From Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps Copyright © 2002 by Ted Kooser
****
AT THE OFFICE EARLY
by Ted Kooser
Rain has beaded the panes
of my office windows,
and in each little lens
the bank at the corner
hangs upside down.
What wonderful music
this rain must have made
in the night, a thousand banks
turned over, the change
crashing out of the drawers
and bouncing upstairs
to the roof, the soft
percussion of the ferns
dropping out of their pots,
the ballpoint pens
popping out of their sockets
in a fluffy snow
of deposit slips.
Now all day long,
as the sun dries the glass,
I'll hear the soft piano
of banks righting themselves,
the underpaid tellers
counting their nickels and dimes.
From One World at a Time by Ted Kooser Copyright © 1985
****
So This Is Nebraska
by Ted Kooser
The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,
clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like
waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
From Flying at Night, by Ted Kooser copywrite 2005
****
Website:
www.tedkooser.com/
Bio quoted from official website:
Ted Kooser is one of Nebraska’s most highly regarded poets and the country’s newest Poet Laureate. A professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he is the author of eleven full-length collections of poetry, including Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004) and Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). Over the years his works have appeared in many periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. Koosers’ poems are included in textbooks and anthologies used in both secondary schools and college classrooms across the country. He has received two NEA fellowships in poetry, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, The James Boatwright Prize, and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council.
Kooser has read his poetry for The Academy of American Poets in New York City as well as for many university audiences including those of the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell at Ithaca, Case Western Reserve at Cleveland, The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He has conducted writing workshops in connection with many of these readings.
In addition to poetry, Kooser has written in a variety of forms including plays, fiction, personal essays, and literary criticism. His first book of prose, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003 and Third Place in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award in Nonfiction for 2002. The book was chosen as the Best Book Written by a Midwestern Writer for 2002 by Friends of American Writers. It also won the Gold Award for Autobiography in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. The University of Nebraska Press will publish his newest book The Poetry Home Repair Manual in January 2005. The book will give beginning poets tips for their writing.
Currently he is editor and publisher of Windflower Press which specializes in the publication of contemporary poetry. Though mostly inactive now, Windflower published a number of books as well as two literary magazines, The Salt Creek Reader (1967-1975) and The Blue Hotel (1980-1981). The Salt Creek Reader was awarded several grants of support from the National Endowment of the Arts through The Coordination Council of Literary Magazines. Kooser published several anthologies through Windflower Press. One of these, The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry, was listed by Library Journal as one of the best books from small presses for 1980. Seventeen Danish Poets in Translation received international notice, and As Far As I Can See; Contemporary Writing of the Middle Plains is in use as a text in secondary schools and colleges across the plains region. In 1999, Kooser published Roy Scheele's Keeping the Horses as a fundraising project for the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association.
Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Kooser earned a BS at Iowa State University in 1962 and an MA at the University of Nebraska in 1968. He is a former vice-president of the Lincoln Benefit Life, where he worked as an insurance representative for many years. He lives on an acreage near the town of Garland, Nebraska, with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, and dogs, Alice and Howard. He also has a son, Jeff, and a granddaughter, Margaret.
Books Published:
Poetry:
Official Entry Blank, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1969
A Local Habitation & A Name, Solo Press, San Luis Obispo, 1974
Not Coming to be Barked At, Pentagram Press, Milwaukee, 1976
Sure Signs, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980
One World at a Time, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985
The Blizzard Voices, Bieler Press, St. Paul, 1986
Weather Central, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994
Winter Morning Walks; 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000.
Braided Creek, with Jim Harrison. Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
Delights and Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, 2004.
Flying at Night, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
Nonfiction:
Local Wonders; Seasons in the Bohemian Alps. University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
The Poetry Home Repair Manual. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Chapbooks and Special Editions:
Grass County, privately printed, 1971
Twenty Poems, Best Cellar Press, Crete, NE, 1973
Shooting a Farmhouse/So This is Nebraska, Ally Press, St. Paul, 1975
Voyages to the Inland Sea, with Harley Elliott, Center for Contemporary
Poetry, LaCrosse, WI, 1976
Old Marriage and New, Cold Mountain Press, Austin, TX, 1978
Cottonwood County, with William Kloefkorn, Windflower Press, 1979
Etudes, Bits Press, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1992
A Book of Things, Lyra Press, Lincoln, 1995.
A Decade of Ted Kooser Valentines, Penumbra Press, Omaha, 1996
Lights on a Ground of Darkness, University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Awards:
Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry, 1976 and 1978
Writing Fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts, 1976 and 1984
Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, 1980
Stanley Kunitz Poetry Prize, Columbia Magazine, 1984
Pushcart Prize, 1984
Governor's Art Award, 1988
Mayor's Art Award, 1989
Richard Hugo Prize, Poetry Northwest, 1994.
James Boatwright Award, Shenandoah, 2000
Nebraska Arts Council Merit Award in Poetry, 2000
Mari Sandoz Award, Nebraska Library Association, 2000
Nebraska Book Award for poetry, 2001
Barnes & Noble Discover Nonfiction Prize, third place, 2003
Friends of American Writers Prize, 2003
Honorable Mention, Society of Midland Authors nonfiction prize, 2003
First place, ForeWord Magazine autobiographical writing competition, 2003
The Best American Poetry, 2003
Nebraska Book Award for nonfiction, 2003
Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize (with Jim Harrison), 2004
United States Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry, 2004
Pulitzer Prize for poetry (Delights and Shadows), 2005 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, 2005
Best American Essays, 2005
Pushcart Prize, 2005
*********************************************
On-Line sources used:
-> Poets.org
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1269
-> Ted Kooser
www.tedkooser.com/index.html
->Nebraska Center for Writers
mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/kooser.htm
-> National Public Radio
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4965544
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I hope you enjoyed reading... please feel free to leave any comments or additional work by Ted Kooser you feel others would enjoy.
...jeanne...
