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When I was a kid, I suppose I got more praise for being able to draw things and paint things than I did for my little amateur poems I was writing. But the thing that I'm trying to do with my painting is that I'm trying to keep it in the realm of pleasure. I don't show my work, I don't try to sell it.

Ted Kooser

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Ted Kooser
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: April 25
Poet
Writer
Ames
Iowa
Kids
Suppose
Able
Draw
Little
Praise
Writing
Paint
Thing
Painting
Amateur
Trying
Pleasure
Realm
Work
Show
Poems
Things
Keep
Sell

More quotes by Ted Kooser

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a happy birthday this evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness. I could easily have switched on a lamp, but I wanted to ride the day down into night, to sit alone, and smooth the unreadable page with the pale gray ghost of my hand
Ted Kooser
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A poem is a record of a discovery.
Ted Kooser
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When she left me I stood out in the thunderstorm, hoping to be destroyed by lightning. It missed, first left, then right.
Ted Kooser
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Sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can't read the address.
Ted Kooser
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I farm a little plot of things to say, with not much frontage on the busy road.
Ted Kooser
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I've written some poems that are in the middle ground - who are in between very challenging and abundantly clear, but there's a tremendous investment in the challenging poem, and it's been going on so long that the whole infrastructure supporting it, a lot of critics and theorists and so on are deeply invested in maintaining that status.
Ted Kooser
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If you look at the Directory of American Poets and Writers, you know there are hundreds of poets in New York City. So therefore, just by specific gravity, it seems like a more significant place. Robert Wrigley is a poet who lives in rural Idaho - I think it's really back-country Idaho - and he writes beautiful poems.
Ted Kooser
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There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing.
Ted Kooser
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Keeping a journal is like taking good care of one’s heart.
Ted Kooser
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There's always been what I would call the William Carlos Williams strain, in which poems of simplicity and clarity are valued by a different community. I was talking to Galway Kinnell one day, and he said that there was an audience for poetry up until about 1920 and then, from that point on, the poets and the critics drifted.
Ted Kooser
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Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.
Ted Kooser
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In my work, I really try to look at ordinary things quite closely to see if there isn't a little bit of something special about them. I'm trying to make something as nearly perfect as I can out of words.
Ted Kooser
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Mike Forsberg's images give us bright openings onto a world. . . . Here on the Great Plains both people and trees and everything else are in some way shaped by wind and weather. This book, too, has been shaped by where it comes from, and that's just a part of its beauty.
Ted Kooser
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Turtle has just one plan at a time, and every cell buys into it.
Ted Kooser
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The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.
Ted Kooser
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There are mornings when everything brims with promise, even my empty cup.
Ted Kooser
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All night, this soft rain from The distant past. No wonder I sometimes Waken as a child.
Ted Kooser
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One movement that I find interesting - this is not a movement in poetry necessarily, but there's a movement on a lot of campuses now called eco - criticism. It's a body of theory based on how nature is treated in literary works. That sort of interests me.
Ted Kooser