Former poet laureate speaks to USU Friday
Poetry should come naturally and be pleasurable for the poet and the reader, a former U.S. poet laureate told an audience of USU students and faculty Friday.
“Poetry ought to be fun. It isn’t like a problem that has to be solved,” Ted Kooser said during a panel discussion in the David B. Haight Alumni Center.
The rigid, inflexible way schools have taught poetry during the past 100 years has “taken the fun out of poetry,” said Kooser, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2004 to 2006. Many people dislike poetry because of teachers who insisted students find the same meaning in a poem as what was in “the back of the teacher’s manual,” he said.
Kooser, an English professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said poetry is important because it gives people a fresh way of looking at things. The greatest response a poet could receive would be to have a reader say, “I’ll never see the world the same again,” he said.
Kooser said he began writing poetry when he was an adolescent because he wanted to impress girls. He was small, he had acne and no athletic or musical ability, and he decided that being a poet would make him seem “romantic and interesting,” he said. He began to dress like the beat poets of the time and carry huge books everywhere he went so he would look like a poet. He also began to write poetry and has written nearly every day since.
“One of the reasons I’m a successful poet is I’ve done it every day for 50 years,” he said.
Kooser said he begins writing at 4:30 a.m. every day at his Nebraska home. Though he writes so often, he only produces something he thinks is worth publishing about once a month, he said.
Kooser and three English department faculty members took part in the panel discussion as part of the May Swenson Project, which is sponsored by the English department. Swenson is a nationally renowned poet who was born in Logan in 1913 and graduated from USU. The May Swenson project was established to honor her and promote poetry, said Paul Crumbley, an associate professor and director of the project.
Swenson won most of the country’s major poetry awards before her death in 1989, Crumbley said, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from USU. She had a large impact on American poetry and showed that a poet doesn’t have to write in only one style, said panel member and associate professor Michael Sowder. Kooser said Swenson’s poetry had a large influence on him when he was young.
“She could do anything,” he said. “You could pick up one of her collections and learn everything there is to know about poetry.”
If they can raise enough money, organizers of the May Swenson Project hope to hold similar events every year, Crumbley said. Bringing more nationally known poets like Kooser to the university in the future will show the influence Swenson had on American poetry, he said.
Kooser also held a poetry reading Friday evening in the USU Performance Hall.
-dfelix@cc.usu.edu