Poetry Reading by Ted Kooser:

Friday, March 23, 2012 – 6:30 pm

"Ted Kooser will one day rank alongside Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams…an authentic poet of the American people.”

Minneapolis Tribune

Former Poet Laureate of the United States Ted Kooser will give a poetry reading and book signing at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota.  The event begins at 6:30 p.m. with a reception in the historic main residence of the Anderson Center, followed by the reading and book signing at 7:30 p.m. in the Center’s main art gallery.

Ted Kooser is one of the nation’s most highly regarded poets and served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2004-2006.  In 2005, he received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book, Delights & Shadows, published by Copper Canyon Press.  A Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, he is the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry.

Koosers’ poems are included in textbooks and anthologies used in both secondary and college classrooms nationwide, and his work regularly appears in such publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Nation. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as many other national and regional honors, including three Nebraska Book Awards, two Society of Midland Authors Prizes, and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Nebraska, South Dakota State University, and the State University of New York at Binghamton.

In addition to poetry, Kooser has published three books of nonfiction—Lights on a Ground of Darkness, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, and Local Wonders—and two children’s books—Bag in the Wind and The House Held Up By Trees. He also writes the nationally syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” published in hundreds of newspapers across the country.

Throughout a distinguished writing career, critics have praised Kooser for his clarity and accessibility and, as The New York Times noted, his “genius for making the ordinary sacramental.” Librarian of Congress James Billington said of Kooser: “He is a major poetic voice for rural and small town America and the first Poet Laureate chosen from the Great Plains.”

Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Kooser was educated at Iowa State University and the University of Nebraska.  He is former vice president of Lincoln Benefit Life, an insurance company, and currently lives on a farm near Garland, Nebraska.

The event is free and open to the public.  Books will be for sale and a book signing will follow the reading. 

For more information regarding Anderson Center Events, Classes and Retreats, please call 651-388-2009 or email: info@andersoncenter.org

FLYING AT NIGHT

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,

snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn

back into the little system of his care.

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

THE FAN IN THE WINDOW

It is September, and a cool breeze

from somewhere ahead is turning the blades;

night, and the slow flash of the fan

the last light between us and the darkness.

Dust has begun to collect on the blades,

haymaker's dust from distant fields,

dust riding to town on the night-black wings

of the crows, a thin frost of dust

which clings to the fan in just the way

we cling to the earth as it spins.

The fan has brought us through,

its shiny blades like the screw of a ship

that has pushed its way through summer—

cut flowers awash in its wake,

the stagnant Sargasso Sea of July

far behind us. For the moment, we rest,

we lie in the dark hull of the house,

we rock in the troughs off the shore

of October, the engines cooling,

the fan blades so lazily turning, but turning.

MOURNERS

After the funeral, the mourners gather

under the rustling churchyard maples

and talk softly, like clusters of leaves.

White shirt cuffs and collars flash in the shade:

highlights on deep green water.

They came this afternoon to say goodbye,

but now they keep saying hello and hello,

peering into each other's faces,

slow to let go of each other's hands.

SPARKLERS

I scratched your name in longhand

on the night, then you wrote mine.

I couldn't see you, near me,

laughing and chasing my name

through the air, but I could hear

your heart, I think, and feel your breath

against the darkness, hurrying.

One word swirled out of your hand

as you rushed hard to write it

all the way out to its end

before its beginning was gone.

It left a frail red line

trembling along on the darkness,

and that was my name, my name.