For someone holding the most conspicuous job a poet in the US could aspire to, Ted Kooser is unaffectedly low-key. Soft-spoken and self-deprecating, the 67-year-old was appointed poet laureate for a second consecutive term in April 2005, in the same week that he was awarded the Pulitzer prize for his 10th book of poems, Delights and Shadows.
Unlike British laureates, whose appointment is for 10 years and who are expected to compose poetry on significant national occasions, poet laureate consultants in poetry are chosen annually by the US librarian of Congress to serve "as the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans" and to "raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry", for which they receive a privately endowed stipend.
"I think of the job as being a kind of public relations specialist for poetry," Kooser has said. The opening pages of his recently published The Poetry Home Repair Manual explain why such a role is so necessary. "I'll venture that 99 per cent of the people who read The New Yorker prefer the cartoons to the poems," he writes. "A lot of this resistance to poetry is to be blamed on poets."
I ask whether he considers this a uniquely US problem. "I'm not intelligent enough, or informed enough, to answer that question. But it's a fact that a lot of people in this country are turned off by poetry." One reason, he thinks, is that young readers usually learn at school that understanding a poem is hard work, "like cracking a walnut and digging out the meat".
He believes that critical acclaim for the late work of poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound fuelled the notion that a poem's impenetrability is a sign of its quality. "I detest elitism of any kind," he says. "There's been this assumption along with modernism that the reader should come halfway to the work. I frankly don't believe readers should be expected to make an effort to learn something in order to understand a poem. I've never met readers like that, although I'm sure there are some, particularly on campuses. I'm not saying it's not all right to write challenging poetry. But the sort of reader I'm interested in is the average person on the street."
The poem "Selecting a Reader", from his collection True Signs, illustrates Koos-er's transparent style and reveals, with tongue in cheek, what he expects from a prospective audience. "First, I would have her 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 would 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."
His poetry dwells on closely observed moments of daily life, imbuing the most commonplace images - an unbroken beer-bottle in a roadside ditch, a jar of buttons, an ageing tattooed man at a yard sale - with an almost childlike surprise. He was profoundly influenced, he admits, by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), ap-pointed poet laureate in 1952, whose belief that there are "no ideas but in things" is best exemplified by his poem "The Red Wheelbarrow": "so much depends upon/ a red wheelbarrow/ glazed with rain water/ beside the white chickens."
"I learnt from Williams that material for poetry is all around us, that ordinary objects are made special by drawing attention to them. His poem could very well say: 'So much depends upon a galvanised bucket standing on the side of the house.' So much depends upon anything, really. I also like the fact that Williams led a life of service in other ways than through his poetry," he adds, referring to Williams' job as a paediatrician.
Kooser himself worked in the insurance business for 35 years, before retiring in 1999. (This often draws comparisons with Wallace Stevens, another US poet who toiled in insurance.) "I knew early in life that I would never be able to make a living as a poet," he explains, "and that if I wanted to support myself and a family I would need to find a job that wouldn't take every ounce of energy I had, so that I'd be able to write in my spare time. The insurance job was that."
Much has been made of Kooser's being the first poet laureate from the US's Great Plains. Born in Ames, Iowa, he has lived in Nebraska since he was a graduate student. He now lives on a farm outside the town of Garland, some 20 miles from the state capital, Lincoln. He has written about the region in a delightful prose volume, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps. The Alps in the title are a playful allusion to the nearby range of low hills, settled in the 1870s by Czech and Germanimmigrants.
"Contrary to what out-of-state tourists might tell you," the book begins, "Nebraska isn't flat but slightly tilted, like a long church-basement table with the legs on one end not perfectly snapped in place, not quite enough of a slant for the tuna-and-potato-chip casseroles to slide off into the Missouri river . . . Across this plain, the Platte river meanders from side to side, like a man who has lost a hubcap and is looking for it in the high grass on both sides of the road."
Most of Kooser's predecessors have been east coast or west coast writers, and I ask if he believes there is such a thing as a Midwest or Great Plains sensibility in his work. "Frankly I don't. There's been a lot of talk about that, and people say things about my work that always surprise me. In Delights and Shadows, for instance, there are many poems with nothing specifically tied to the Great Plains: the guy with the tattoo in the yard sale, the woman in the wheelchair - they could be anyone. My guess is there's something that readers want to impose on the poems. If I'd lived all my life in Idaho or Connecticut I would probably be writing the same kind of poetry. It would take a lot smarter person than me to sum up a Midwestern philosophy."
He even teamed up with the Arizona-based poet, novelist and scriptwriter Jim Harrison, an old friend, to publish a slim volume of haiku-like poems, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. "That book collects all those little snatches of poetry in our 20-year correspondence."
Harrison was also the recipient of the poems in Kooser's most personal compilation, Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison, composed as he recovered from cancer. "I'd been extremely ill, snapping out of the radiation thing, and was trying to bring myself back to some kind of health. I started taking these walks before the sun came out. On my walks I would notice things. I was training myself to look at things. One morning I came home and wrote a poem, and was thrilled that I could write again after many months of being terribly depressed. I took reassurance from the fact that I could create a little patch of order amid a tremendous sense of chaos. I began writing a poem every day, pasting them on postcards and sending them to Jim."
A poem in Delights and Shadows, "Surviving", ex-plores how fear of death, "ubiquitous as light", forces the poet to notice a ladybird. How, I ask, did disease affect the way he observed the world around him? "You become very alert to the details of life. You spend time noticing things. What comes out of it is a sense of awe and celebration."
Yet even his early work - poems about the very old, about an abandoned farmhouse, a child's grave, a friend's failed suicide, a goldfish that "floats to the top of his life" - seems steeped in an elegiac sense of life's frailty. Kooser's images avoid sentimentality by dwelling on the specific - a widow scrubbing the floor around a toilet bowl one last time, someone emptying a medicine cabinet after a funeral. "Sentimentality," Kooser warns, "is the product of generalisation."
When discussing his personal contribution to the poet laureate's post, he claims to have simply added to his immediate predecessor Billy Collins's efforts to show that poetry can be accessible to broader audiences. He is understandably proud of his column, "American Life in Poetry", freely licensed to interested publications, in which he introduces a new living American poet every week. "At last report, we were in 134 newspapers and had a potential circulation of 9.6m readers."
