American Life in Poetry: Column 474 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE Let’s celebrate the first warm days of spring with a poem for mushroom hunters, this one by Amy Fleury, who lives in Louisiana. First Morel Up from… Read More ›
writing
“On Humpty Dumpty”
On Humpty Dumpty Tyrants of egg-headed ambiguity raise walls of anti-prose, well-trained indecipherable code down which readers will fall and fail like an egg shattered after a spectacular crash. A spectacle for sure, and yet no way to put them whole with horses… Read More ›
Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry”: Column 471
American Life in Poetry: Column 471 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE (2004-2006) Despite having once been bitten by a rabid bat, and survived, much to the disappointment of my critics, I find bats fascinating, and Peggy Shumaker of… Read More ›
Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” Column 470
American Life in Poetry: Column 470 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE 2004-2006 Considering that I’m a dog lover, I haven’t included nearly enough dog poems in this column. My own dog, Howard, now in his dotage, has never… Read More ›
Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry”: Column 469
American Life in Poetry: Column 469 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE The love between parents can be wonderful and mysterious to their children. Robert Hedin, a Minnesota poet and the director of The Anderson Center at Tower View in… Read More ›
A Weekly Poetry Column: Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry”
(U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s poetry column, American Life in Poetry, will appear regularly at The Afternoon Journal.– JK) ****************************** American Life in Poetry: Column 468 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE Here’s another lovely poem to honor the caregivers… Read More ›
U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s Weekly Poetry Column
American Life in Poetry: Column 425 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE If we haven’t done it ourselves, we’ve known people who have, it seems: taken a vacation mostly to photograph a vacation, not really looking at what’s there, but… Read More ›
A Little Digital Simplification
I decided today to scale-down and simplify The Afternoon Journal, to make it less visually polluting, less, well, digital-looking. The tendency on many websites is to gather and display as much information and graphics as possible, an easy thing to do and over-do…. Read More ›
Skating into the new year
I took my daughter ice skating for the first time on the last day of 2013. I had not skated in twenty years. The skates were rented. The ice was man-made. It was warmer inside the colossal ice rink than it… Read More ›
The Pacific 