Friday, June 03, 2011

Poetry Friday: Ted Kooser


I have a special nook in my heart for spiral notebooks, and for Ted Kooser (past posts on Kooser are here. And he'll soon be appearing at our local library -- huzzah!) For years, my journals were written in humble spiral notebooks and I still think nothing beats their levelheaded simplicity. How can one not feel affection -- for the spiral notebook, life as we know it, and Ted Kooser -- after reading this poem?

A Spiral Notebook
by Ted Kooser

The bright wire rolls like a porpoise
in and out of the calm blue sea
of the cover, or perhaps like a sleeper
twisting in and out of his dreams,
for it could hold a record of dreams
if you wanted to buy it for that
though it seems to be meant for
more serious work, with its
college-ruled lines and its cover
that states in emphatic white letters,
5 SUBJECT NOTEBOOK. It seems
....

(Find the rest of the poem here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

The Writer's Armchair has the round up today.

3 comments:

Beth said...

Thank you for sharing this! I love both Ted Koozer and spiral notebooks. (Still journal in spirals, usually found on clearance in drugstores.) And hooray that you're getting to hear Mr. Koozer in person. I hope you'll share about it here!

tanita✿davis said...

I love this poem - I love lists and note books and I have them all over. My spiral bound ones tend to be huge, but I love them, too...

Melanie Bettinelli said...

Love it. I don't write in spiral notebooks nearly so often these days-- my blog sort of fills that niche. But oh they hold a place in my heart.