National Poetry Month: “Selecting a Reader”
April 2nd, 2007 by Matt
Below, you’ll find the first in our, as promised, series of National Poetry Month poems. This one, “Selecting a Reader,” comes to us from Ted Kooser, who spent most of his adult life in Nebraska as an insurance representative, while writing poems “on the side.”
For two years (2004-2006) he was the United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He has also won a Pulitzer Prize. (We thought we’d start off with a big-wig, well, as big a big-wig as a poet can get.) You can buy his most recent book, Flying at Night, by clicking this sentence.
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First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.
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