Ted Kooser Wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Current Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his latest collection, “Delights and Shadows”.

Kooser, a retired life insurance executive, has published ten books of poetry over the past thirty-five years and has received numerous awards. A native of Iowa, he has lived for years in the Lincoln, Nebraska area. There is a hilarious interview with him in the New York Times.

This past December, while attending Jared Carter’s reading at the Library of Congress, I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Kooser, whose work I have admired for a number of years. His quiet understated humor was what anyone who had read his poetry would expect. While most poets are a notoriously jealous lot, it is hard to begrudge such a craftsmen and gentleman his good fortune.

Below is one of my favorites:


Ted Kooser

The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise

The blind always come as such a surprise,
suddenly filling an elevator
with a great white porcupine of canes,
or coming down upon us in a noisy crowd
like the eye of a hurricane.
The dashboards of cars stopped at crosswalks
and the shoes of commuters on trains
are covered with sentences
struck down in mid-flight by the canes of the blind.
Each of them changes our lives,
tapping across the bright circle of our ambitions
like cracks traversing the favorite china.