Daily Nebraskan

Issue date: 2/14/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Bob Al-Greene

For 22 years, University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Ted Kooser wrote an annual Valentine poem and mailed it to women across the country.

It was something joyful to do, he said, and his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, didn't mind him writing to other women.

"She thought it was great fun," he said. "Plus she had no reason to get jealous because I write private poems for her all the time."

He started the tradition by writing "Pocket Poem" in 1986, and then he mailed the poem via postcard to 50 women, most of whom were his friend's wives.

Now he's offering those not-so-private poems in book form. The University of Nebraska Press started offering all 22 years of poems in "Valentines" earlier this year. The book includes illustrations by a friend of Kooser as well as a new poem.

The book chronicles every poem until "This Paper Boat," which was sent on Valentine's Day last year. He included a note to the women that it'd be his last Valentine's Day poem.

He had to stop writing the poems because as he traveled the country attending poetry readings as the U.S. poet laureate, he had told women they could sign up for his Valentine mailing list. Before long the list had grown to 2,500 people. The popularity caused a problem.

Kooser's romantic poem-writing was costing $1,000 a year, so he had to end it.

"I finally told myself I was done because it had gotten so out of hand," he said. "It was the end of an experience."

Kooser then decided to put his poems together in a book.

"I knew that 22 poems wasn't enough to write a book," Kooser said, "but 22 poems accompanied by a picture for each one could be."

Kooser asked his longtime friend Robert Hanna to draw pictures for the book. The two first met at an architecture firm, where Hanna worked, near the UNL campus.

Hanna said the firm had a long, bare hallway, so he made it into an art gallery by hanging paintings.

"Ted would come in and look at the paintings all the time," Hanna said. "So one day I just went up to him and introduced myself, and over time we just became friends."

Hanna illustrated depictions of where Kooser wrote the poems, instead of attempting to describe the poem in a picture. Hanna got the idea from a similar project Robert Faulkner did in Time Magazine.

Hanna proposed the idea to Kooser, telling him the pictures were already drawn. But Kooser felt something was missing. That something was his canine.

"Ted told me he wanted his dog in the pictures," Hanna said. "So in most of the pictures you see it in there."

For those looking for Valentine's Day romance advice, Kooser keeps it pretty simple.

"To be truthful and specific about why you love them, he said."

johnray@dailynebraskan.com

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