Ted Kooser quotes:

Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.

If I don't take the risk, I'll wind up with a bloodless poem. I have to be out there on the edge.

Keeping a journal is like taking good care of one's heart.

Turtle has just one plan at a time, and every cell buys into it.

She'd had little patience with darkness, and her heartheld only a measure of shadow. I touchedthe warm dust of those colors, her tools,and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.

When she left me I stood out in the thunderstorm, hoping to be destroyed by lightning. It missed, first left, then right.

Now the seasons are closing their files on each of us, the heavy drawers full of certificates rolling back into the tree trunks, a few old papers flocking away. Someone we loved has fallen from our thoughts, making a little, glittering splash like a bicycle pushed by a breeze. Otherwise, not much has happened; we fell in love again, finding that one red reather on the wind.

Just as a dancer, turning and turning, may fill the dusty light with the soft swirl of her flying skirts, our weeping willow -- now old and broken , creaking in the breeze -- turns slowly, slowly in the winter sun, sweeping the rusty roof of the barn with the pale blue lacework of her shadow.

All night, this soft rain from The distant past. No wonder I sometimes Waken as a child.

I like the idea of there being times when even words cost so much you used them sparingly. I have known a lot of old men and women who talked as if they were paying Western Union by the word.

Sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

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.

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....

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

A poem is a record of a discovery.

I farm a little plot of things to say, with not much frontage on the busy road.

I like the poem on the page and not at the podium. I like to address the poem in peace and quiet, not on the edge of a folding chair with a full bladder. I can't stand hearing a poem that I can't see. I did a reading at Wayne State, and it ended with the comedy such occasions deserve. I'd seated myself on a piano bench, and discovered upon attempting to arise at the end that the varnish had softened and I was stuck fast. The hinge was to the front, under my knees, so that as I tried to get up, I merely opened the lid.

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.

The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way - engaging, compelling, even beautiful.

There are mornings when everything brims with promise, even my empty cup.