I like the idea of there being times when even words cost so much you used them sparingly. I have known a lot of old men and women who talked as if they were paying Western Union by the word. — Ted Kooser Copy Share Image
The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful. — Ted Kooser Copy Share Image
If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal… — Ted Kooser Copy Share
There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during… — Ted Kooser Copy Share Image
“Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which… — Ted Kooser Copy Share
When she left me I stood out in the thunderstorm, hoping to be destroyed by lightning. It missed, first left, then right. — Ted Kooser Copy Share Image
Every poet gets to choose what kind of community he or she serves with the poems, and it's true that there is a community for very difficult, challenging poetry. It's a community that's established itself over the last 80 years, that was originally, in effect, really started by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. They believed that poetry ought to… — Ted Kooser Copy Share
I had in effect been thrown out of graduate school because I was a lousy graduate student, and I had to find a job, and I took the first job that came along. It happened to be a management trainee job in a life insurance company, and I just stayed. It was always, mainly, the idea was that I would… — Ted Kooser Copy Share
When I was a kid, I suppose I got more praise for being able to draw things and paint things than I did for… — Ted Kooser Copy Share Image
If I don't take the risk, I'll wind up with a bloodless poem. I have to be out there on the edge. — Ted Kooser Copy Share Image
There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different… — Ted Kooser Copy Share Image
I like the poem on the page and not at the podium. I like to address the poem in peace and quiet, not on… — Ted Kooser Copy Share Image
