Starving for Order

A Conversation with Ted Kooser.

- Daniel Simon

While in Lincoln to attend the recent Nebraska Book Festival, I sat down with Ted Kooser (b. 1939) to discuss poetry, belief, and tolerance. A former US Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (2004 –2006), Kooser is currently Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His many awards include a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (2005). Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2018.

Daniel Simon: “On every topographic map, / the fingerprints of God.” That couplet appears in Braided Creek (2003), your “conversation in poetry” with Jim Harrison. Is there a sacred geography in your poetry?

Ted Kooser: I described the place most sacred to me in my prose memoir Lights on a Ground of Darkness (2005), Daniel, and looked at it again in my children’s book The Bell in the Bridge (2016). It’s my maternal grandparents’ house and roadside Standard Oil station at the edge of Guttenberg, Iowa, a magical place when I was a boy. I think my true center is there.

Simon: You write so sweetly about John and Elizabeth Moser, your maternal grandparents, especially in your memoir. And you’ve written at least a couple of poems about Elizabeth’s funeral in January 1962, when it was twenty-two below. The striking visual in those poems for me is the thawing barrels in the cemetery, which the two men stoked all night in order to soften the ground for the burial.