MPR’s Tom Crann interviews U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. They discuss Kooser winning the Pulitzer Prize. Segment also includes Kooser reading two poems.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) This year's Pulitzer Prize in poetry has been awarded to the US Poet Laureate Ted kooser for his collection to Lights and Shadows his poems as the Pulitzer Prize committee. Put it reveal the remarkable within an otherwise Ordinary World. He's in town for a reading at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis tonight, and he joins me here in the studio and first congratulations mr. You very much. How do you find out? You've won a Pulitzer Prize? What happens?
(00:00:25) Well the way I found out about it was I was doing some emails and an email came. Came up from the University of Nebraska public relations office saying they needed an immediate quote for the Associated Press. I hadn't heard anything about it as it as it happens. They the Pulitzer people notify people by Western Union, but I live in a town of 260 people and we don't have a Western Union matter of fact, I doubt of Western Union can even find Garland
(00:00:49) Nebraska and I'm still amazed that they use Western Union
(00:00:52) at the yeah. Well sort of coined a nice and way
(00:00:55) sure telegram an actual Town University of Nebraska because you are on the faculty there.
(00:01:00) Uh-huh. Yeah, I teach just part-time there.
(00:01:02) Yeah. Now when you were a vice president at an insurance company in Nebraska, which you were for somewhat 30 years working at the insurance company 35.
(00:01:10) That's right. Yes.
(00:01:12) Did you ever look ahead to a time especially in your final few years before retirement when you'd be both Poet Laureate of the US and Pulitzer Prize winner,
(00:01:20) of course, not and yeah, neither frankly. Yeah, you know, these are things that that AR Miracles I
(00:01:27) think and they both happened in the recent what lasts 18 months or so. That's right. So one does not ever set out with the goal to be Poet Laureate or to win a Pulitzer Prize. You don't get away. No.
(00:01:38) Yeah, you you how could you you know, it seems like sort of an impossible thing.
(00:01:43) But in 1999 Yuri did retire from that job. That's right as an insurance executive and I suppose the comparison we all make is Wallace Stevens as well who also worked professionally and insurance and wrote and are there parallels in the way that both of you worked or the way? Scheduled your time of day to get the writing. Well, you know,
(00:02:02) I don't know that much about how Stevens did he's riding. I really sometime everybody's always ask me this question how to spend little time finding out more about him. But the way I did it I wrote before work. I got up at 4:30 in the morning and wrote until I had to get my necktie on it about seven and I did that every day.
(00:02:19) You think we'll ever see a time where poets can work and then some do but can make a good living as a full-time poet poet all the time.
(00:02:27) Well, you know, there are some poets who can do that. Sort of thing, but you know that requires a great deal of reading engagements and so on and frankly if poetry was worth a lot of money, it would ruin it. I think you know, it's better off being worth $5 a line, you know, is
(00:02:43) that what you get for? It's a New Yorker
(00:02:45) poem. Well, I don't the last time I was in the New Yorker was long ago and it was like five dollars a line, but that's true. That's true. I think of the Atlantic and some of those magazines. Yeah, you know you for a for a poem of moderate length, you could get about half a sack of groceries, you know.
(00:03:00) And is that that's not frustrating to you as a poet?
(00:03:02) No, not at all. No, you know that going in sure
(00:03:05) now in one interview about your most recent collection. Your most recent collection is called de lights and shadows for which you won the Pulitzer Prize. You identified this poem screech owl as your favorite in the collection first, you still feel that way. I do like that pain
(00:03:20) quite a bit, you know, you tend to love all your children, you know, but yeah. Yeah, I do like that one.
(00:03:27) Could I ask you to read it for us, please?
(00:03:29) Sure. screech owl all night each Reedy Winnie from a bird no bigger than a heart flies out of a tall black pine and in a breath is taken away by the Stars yet with small Hope from the center of Darkness. It calls out again and
(00:03:48) again, Why do you say that as if not your favorite from The Collection one of your favorites?
(00:03:54) Well, I I see this as a as a as a poem of Hope against darkness and so on and you know, it's a it and I think it says it will in a very small, you know in a very small frame.
(00:04:09) I've read your a very organized person and you like to you like the process of polishing these poems so that every jot and Tittle is in
(00:04:18) order yes when I'm done. Them there's nothing left to be done. I hope yeah,
(00:04:23) so how long will you work on a poem like screech owl? Oh that
(00:04:27) poem is, you know, it's about eight lines. I suppose that poem would have gone through 30 or 40 versions
(00:04:34) 30 or 40 ravana. Yeah, but you probably didn't have the luxury of those revisions when you were working on your postcard poems your poems of winter mornings tell me about that was a period when you were battling cancer. I understand that recovering from government from but yeah,
(00:04:52) yes, I wrote those. I wrote One poem a day and pasted them on postcards and sent them to my friend Jim Harrison and it's also a poet. Yes, and I wanted to be doing something each day to try to find a little order in the world against a lot of disorder and Chaos in my life. And so yes, I did that. Although there was some editing on the far end of it because I had written a hundred and thirty of them and I cut it back to a hundred. So I did a little bit of adjusting, you know. There was a very productive period and primarily I think because I was being driven by great anxiety and and and then that the Quest for finding some sort of order.
(00:05:33) Can you read one of those for us as well? I like the one from January 4th. This would be the year was 1998
(00:05:38) 19. This would be early in 1999. Okay. Yes, and each of these poems. I set them up with a little weather line January 4th for below zero. My wife took an apple to work this morning hurriedly picking it up and out of a plastic bag on the kitchen counter and though she has been gone an hour. The open bag still holds in a swirl the graceful turn of her wrist a fountain lifting and now I can see that the air by the closet door keeps the Bell like Halo she made spinning into her winter coat while pushing her apple through a sleeve and back out into the
(00:06:18) ordinary. It seems that forgive me for a sort of analyzing on the spot. But what you might be doing there is capturing this very ordinary moment in snapshot form. But also then it becomes it's captured for us but it becomes something extraordinary. It becomes something spiritual. It becomes evanescent.
(00:06:42) Yeah. Well, you know part of this is quite simple if you take anything in life that looks ordinary and and remove everything around it it It gets it has its own special sense to it. And you know, that's I do more with this than that, of course, but that's just the way it works. You know, you take a cardboard tube and look at anything. It looks a little bit more special I think
(00:07:04) isolating on the detail. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think anyone with a bit of skill and talent can be a poet?
(00:07:13) I think that yes, I do think that I don't know whether they're going to be a published poet or a successful poet. But I don't I wouldn't see anything wrong with any but with everybody writing poems what better thing to be doing with your time. I mean, you know, I've been considering what you could be doing with it watching Survivor, you know, and you know, I like the idea of people doing something during which they are not being Scoundrels and are doing No harm, and so on.
(00:07:44) Mr. Kozar, thanks so much for stopping by today. Thank you very much. Taking the time and gracing us with some of your poems from one of them from your Pulitzer Prize Winning Collection the lights and shadows. Thank you.