TheBanyanTree: Poet Laureate

[Mike Pingleton]

Ted Kooser is the new Poet Laureate for the United States.  He is from
Nebraska, and his poetry speaks to the common person.  It is simple
and yet rich with metaphor, poetry about aunts and uncles, dogs and
cows and snow and getting old and barns falling down.

The new Poet Laureate for the United States made an appearance at our
public library yesterday evening.  I caught wind of it from an
interview on our local NPR station.  After supper I took Molly with me
to the library.  We were early so we got good seats right up front, a
few feet from a fiddle/bodhran combo.  They were quite good.  There
were refreshments, too, coffee and tea and nut cups and petit-fours. 
This was the Poet Laureate, after all.

The auditorium filled up to standing room only.  There seemed to be a
lot of young students in the crowd, high school and middle school,
which pleased me.  Lots of people were clutching books - there was to
be a book-signing at the end.  I had a copy of Sure Signs with me.

Ted Kooser came up to the podium with a binder full of poems.  He was
a man of small stature, neatly but not overly dressed - oxford shirt,
tie, blazer.  Mid-sixties.  He seemed very comfortable and relaxed in
front of the microphone.

He told some stories, read some poems, told stories behind the poems. 
You would think the Poet Laureate would be some high-powered professor
of English Literature, composing odes, eddas and quatrains, pulling
sonnets from out a sleeve with a flourish.  Ted Kooser was an
executive with an insurance company, a man who got up every morning at
four thirty to write before going to work at his ordinary, unpoetic
day job.

After the poems there was a question-and-answer session.  I asked him
a question.  I said I had brought my daughter to see him because I
thought that poetry mattered; could he please tell her why poetry
matters?  He looked at Molly as he answered.  In essence, he said that
poetry mattered because it was an effective way of getting meaning
across to others, and to give meaning and credence and importance to
those things in life that matter.  A young woman asked him what was
the most important thing necessary to write poetry.  'Reading,' he
replied.

Afterwards he signed my book 'To Mike and Molly' and said 'Good luck
to you in the future, young lady,' to my daughter.  She was pleased
with both.

Molly writes a few poems now and again, and perhaps she'll never take
up the craft in a serious manner, but I can hope that poetry will
matter to her and to her children some day.  If nothing else, I hope
that she will look back on this visit from the Poet Laureate and
remember that she mattered to me.