There won't be any tests when Ted Kooser, the nation's poet laureate, comes to town this week. Kooser isn't that type of literary lion.

Instead, Kooser is down home and accessible, as comfortable writing about everyday things as he is sitting in his Adirondack chair back home on his 62-acre farm in Garland, Neb.

That's the way Kooser wants you to feel, too, as he makes his way through a weeklong series of public readings and workshops on his first visit to Hawai'i. Asked what he hopes people will take away from his appearance, he's got a typically short, honest answer.

"I want them to have a good time, that's all," he said.

Since 2004, Kooser has held the position of U.S. poet laureate, a title that the Library of Congress, which made the appointment, says "serves as the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans."

However, not even that lofty language and winning the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry have changed Kooser's poetic style, which uses simple language to create easy-to-approach works that, remarkably, touch on some of life's biggest mysteries.

Maybe that's because he's always been a real working man, writing poems on the side. Kooser spent 35 years in the life insurance business, starting as an underwriter and working his way up to vice president of what's now known as Ameritas Financial Services.

For decades he put his time in the office, but put his energy into writing, waking up at 4:30 a.m. to craft his poems, which often come out sounding like the voice of rural and small-town America.

"I knew very early in life I would never be able to make a living as a poet, and I would need to find a job that wouldn't take every ounce of energy I had. Not giving every ounce of my blood to my job was my way of rebelling," Kooser told The Advertiser in an e-mail interview before heading to Hawai'i.

"I think it helped me to write for a more general audience, because the people of my day-to-day-community were not literary readers."

Since his appointment, Kooser has been on the road nearly year-round, teaching, lecturing and doing readings in an effort he describes as being the Library of Congress' public relationship specialist.

He also edits a weekly poetry feature, American Life in Poetry, which appears Sundays in The Advertiser as well as more than 100 other American newspapers.

"Of course, poetry was standard fare in newspapers for much of the country's history," he said. "It only ended in the 20th century, when much poetry became difficult or in need of interpretations."

One thing Kooser's not doing much of right now is writing. Since his appointment, he's written only a handful of poems, of which he says only two or three are worth keeping.

Instead, Kooser's mission these days is to help others understand poetry.

During his time in Hawai'i, he'll give three public readings, one workshop for writers and another for teachers.

Because a sense of place plays such a big role in his own work, he's eager to experience for himself the state that he says most people still know mostly through the romantic images of films from the 1940s and 1950s.

But it's the reality of poetry as much as the imagery that he thrives on.

"I read poems as if they were experiences," he said. "I experience the poem, just as I'd experience anything else, and I can be moved by the experiences or not moved. People can do with poems as they wish; they don't have to ferret out a meaning to pass the course."

LEARN MORE

www.tedkooser.com
www.americanlifeinpoetry.org

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.