The Kooser Letters - #1: Thoughts on Revision

In 1995, while attending the Purdue MFA program and serving on the editorial staff for The Sycamore Review, I struck up a brief correspondence with Ted Kooser. It began with me sending a solicitation letter for poems along with questions about his craft. The following was his response.


Feb 7, 1995

Dear Brent,

Thanks for your letter.

I seem to catch most of my poems on the fly. I'll be sitting somewhere, reading or dreaming, and some snatch of a phrase will breeze by and get my attention. I then need to drop everything else and start writing. I can usually get a first draft done in a half hour or hour, and then I start revising. I may work on revisions for several days, as time permits, and I also send my new work to Leonard Nathan, a good poet and longtime friend. Both Leonard and my wife are good counsel. I'd guess that most of my better poems have gone through thirty or forty revisions, some of those being no more than the change of a word or a punctuation mark. Though my original notes are handwritten in a workbook, I revise on my Macintosh, thus saving reams of paper. During revision, I work toward:

• some kind of unifying rhythm that will carry (or drive) the poem through its entire length. This is difficult to explain, since it has little to do with scansion. It is more like a speech- or rhetorical rhythm, a kind of broader wavelength.

• I try to clear up the language, so that it doesn't set up unproductive impediments to the reader's attention. I don't want the reader having to stop to look up a word or to try to understand what I'm writing about. I always go for proper punctuation, complete sentences, etc., so that there is little that can call the reader's attention back to the surface of the page. I want the page to be transparent.

• I work toward freshness. Good water colors always look as if they'd been dashed off in one flourish, and I like my poems to have that kind of feeling.

I'm enclosing a few recent poems for your consideration. Thanks for asking.

I do have a new book out - Weather Central, from University of Pittsburgh Press. It's my first collection in nine years and the reviews have been good so far.

Best from Nebraska,

Ted Kooser

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