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Ted Kooser is a two-time US Poet Laureate and the author of numerous poetry collections, including Raft (Copper Canyon Press, 2024); Delights & Shadows, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Splitting an Order; Kindest Regards; and Cotton Candy. As Poet Laureate he created “American Life in Poetry,” a free weekly column for newspapers, featuring a poem by a contemporary American writer. Born in Ames, Iowa, Kooser is a former vice president of Lincoln Benefit Life, where he worked as an insurance representative for many years. He is Presidential Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Photograph by Matt Valentine.

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Exercise

by Ted Kooser
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Nine day-care children are out for a walk
on a winter morning, under a gray sky,
led by a girl in her teens walking sideways

so she can encourage them, boys and girls
strung all along a length of clothesline
held in their mittened hands, the rope


here slack, there tight, tight going slack,
all the children in puffy down jackets
with loosely pursed hoods through which
People on couch
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