Ted Kooser: where poetry meets insurance sales

• Selecting a Reader
• First, I would have her be beautiful,
• and walking carefully up on my poetry
• at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
• her hair still damp at the neck
• from washing it. She should be wearing
• a raincoat, an old one, dirty
• from not having money enough for the cleaners.
• She will take out her glasses, and there
• in the bookstore, she will thumb
• over my poems, then put the book back
• up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
• “For that kind of money, I can get
• my raincoat cleaned.” And she will. 

• Abandoned Farmhouse
• He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
• on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
• a tall man too, says the length of the bed
• in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
• says the Bible with a broken back
• on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
• but not a man for farming, say the fields
• cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

• A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
• papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
• covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
• says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
• Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
• and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
• And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
• It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

• Something went wrong, says the empty house
• in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
• say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
• in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
• And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
• like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
• a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
• a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say. 

• A Birthday Poem
• Just past dawn, the sun stands
• with its heavy red head
• in a black stanchion of trees,
• waiting for someone to come
• with his bucket
• for the foamy white light,
• and then a long day in the pasture.
• I too spend my days grazing,
• feasting on every green moment
• till darkness calls,
• and with the others
• I walk away into the night,
• swinging the little tin bell
• of my name.

Ted Kooser (b. 1939) is an American poet and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2005. One of the first poets from the Great Plains to receive this honor, he is a native of Ames, Iowa, and currently resides in Garland, Nebraska. Like another great American poet, Wallace Stevens, Kooser served as vice president of an insurance company; unlike Stevens’ dense and startling use of diction, however, Kooser’s work is defined by a conversational and accessible style. In an interview, Kooser acknowledged the career track he shared with Stevens but noted with humor that Stevens had had much more time to write his poems on office time.