Ch. 18 Hawaii

Again Hawaii and Nebraska do not have much in common (my cousins, the Weiskerchers from DeWitt Iowa have been to Hawaii...but that is a tale for another time and place). So instead of attempting to make baffling comparisons between the two states I have decided to devote this final posting to another of Nebraska's literary elite. This state sure can claim a lot of intelligent, well-spoken people for its own!

Ted Kooser the United State's 13th Poet Laureate

So This Is Nebraska  by Ted Kooser

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop

over the fields, the telephone lines

streaming behind, its billow of dust

full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,

the loosening barns, their little windows

dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs

hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday

afternoon; July. Driving along

with your hand out squeezing the air,

a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,

top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,

a pickup kicks its fenders off

and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting

your tires go flat, like letting the mice

build a nest in your muffler, like being

no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey

or holding a skinny old man in your lap

while he watches the road, waiting

for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car

and dancing around on the road. You wave

instead and leave your hand out gliding

larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

Background from Wikipedia:

Biography

[edit] Early years

Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Kooser earned a BS at Iowa State University in 1962 and the MA at the University of Nebraska in 1968. He is the author of twelve collections of poetry. He is former vice-president of Lincoln Benefit Life, an insurance company, and lives on land near the village of Garland, Nebraska. He teaches as a Visiting Professor in the English department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is married to Kathleen Rutledge, former editor of the Lincoln Journal Star.



[edit] Career

On August 12, 2004, he was named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Librarian of Congress to serve a term from October 2004 through May 2005. In April 2005, Ted Kooser was appointed to serve a second term as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. During that same week Kooser received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book "Delights and Shadows" (Copper Canyon Press, 2004).



Kooser lives in Garland, Nebraska, and much of his work focuses on the Great Plains. Like Wallace Stevens, Kooser spent much of his working years as an executive in the insurance industry, although Kooser sardonically noted in an interview with the Washington Post that Stevens had far more time to write at work than he ever did. Kooser has won two NEA Literary Fellowships (in 1976 and 1984), the Pushcart Prize, the Nebraska Book Awards for Poetry (2001) and Nonfiction (2004), the Stanley Kunitz Prize (1984), the James Boatwright Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2005).



[edit] Bibliography

Official Entry Blank. (1969).

Grass County. (1971).

Twenty Poems. (1973).

A Local Habitation and a Name. (1974).

Not Coming to Be Barked At. (1976).

Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. (1980).

One World at a Time. (1985).

The Blizzard Voices. (1986).

Weather Central. (1994).

A Book of Things. (1995).

Riding with Colonel Carter. (1999).

Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison. (2001).

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. (with Jim Harrison) (Copper Canyon Press, 2003).

Delights and Shadows. (Copper Canyon Press, 2004).

Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps. (2004).

Flying At Night : Poems 1965-1985. (2005).

The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice For Beginning Poets. (2005).

Valentines