Ted Kooser is a down-to-earth guy from Nebraska. He’s also the new Poet Laureate of the U.S.
Here he’s interviewed by Jeffrey Brown of PBS (read or watch in streaming video). They talk about some of the inspiration for his poetry, including subjects as mundane as “The Last Tomato” (in the garden).
A snippet from the interview, on the subject of ‘making a living’ as a poet:
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JEFFREY BROWN: You did work for an insurance company for many years. Is that because it’s hard to make a living as a poet?
TED KOOSER: Absolutely, yeah. You know, you publish a poem in the very best magazine in this country and you get enough money for a sack of groceries, you know, and that’s about it.
So I needed some sort of a job that I could, you know, where I could continue my writing on the side and so on. So that’s what I did.
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