KOOSER AT UW: Ted Kooser, poet laureate consultant to the U.S. Library of Congress, read from his work and signed books at the UW Art Museum in Laramie Thursday night. His poetry is wonderful, and he’s a crack-up as a storyteller. An audience member asked him whether winning the Pulitzer Prize or being named poet laureate was the greater honor. He launched into a story. He was asked via phone whether he would like to be the new poet laureate. He hemmed and hawed (that's what they do in Nebraska) and the caller said to think about it and he would call back. A bit stunned, Kooser decided to return some overdue DVDs to the video store in town. He immediately smacked into a pole, breaking off his car’s side mirror. He stopped at the garage in town to get the mirror fixed, then returned home. As he got out of the car, he glanced over at the passenger seat and saw the DVDs still sitting there.

He said he reacted to the Pulitzer Prize announcement by walking outside and falling into a pile of leaves. That’s when the photographer from the Omaha paper pulled up and snapped a photo. Kooser said it took him awhile to talk the photographer out of using the picture. Too bad – it would have been terrific. A man with a British accent asked Kooser if he had ever been asked to write a poem for an official state occasion, as is the case with England’s poet laureate. He could only think of one. A few months ago, some fans of Dick Cheney e-mailed him to ask if he would read at the vice president’s birthday. “I e-mailed them right back and said I was not available that evening," said Kooser wryly. “Then I realized that they hadn’t told me when it was.” That got a big laugh at the Veep’s alma mater.

The main event preceded the Q&A, when the poet read “At the Cancer Clinic,” “A Washing of Hands,” “The Beaded Purse,” and about two dozen other poems. The latter poem, one of his longer ones, was “like a condensed Willa Cather novel,” he said. It actually was more like a condensed version of Cather’s story “The Sculptor’s Funeral.” I also was entranced by “A Box of Pastels,” in which he writes about the experience of “holding on my knees a simple wooden box in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.” It was a box of pastels that once belonged to painter Mary Cassatt. It was an appropriate piece to read in the same space featuring a collaborative exhibit, “Poetic Works as Metaphor,” combining the paintings of Robert Motherwell and Jasper Johns with the writings of Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and Irish-born poet Samuel Beckett.

To get a weekly dose of poems selected by Kooser, go to American Life in Poetry.
- posted by Michael Shay @ 9:42 AM