Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday,

February 26, 2020. And today's poem is by Ted Kuzer, an American poet, who served as Poet

Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. He's known as one of the Great

Plains poets and has become one of my favorite poets in the last couple of years.

And I wanted to share a poem with you called Deep Winter.

You can find this in his collection, which came out, I believe in 2018, the end of 2018, called Kindest Regards, New and Selected Poems.

And it came from a collection called Splitting an Order, which was

published in 2014. It goes like this. Deep Winter by Ted Cooser. In the cold blue shadow behind a shed

among young ash and mulberry trees, standing in discarded tires and next to a roll of used and reused

sheepwire and a sheaf of rusty posts. I am alone among the others who have stood here,

as they looked out over the snowy fields, holding their breath against the stillness, against our

awareness of each other. Whole generations empty between us, like gaps between saplings.

All of us having come tracking through winter to look for something to use to prop up something else,

or for a part of a part and not having found it, standing both inside and outside of time,

becoming a piece of some great, rusty work we seem to fit

exactly.

I imagine it wasn't quite terribly obvious when I was reading that, But that 18-line poem is all one sentence.

One of the things that is commonplace in a lot of Cusers' work, although not just Couser, is a sort of making...

The poetry of lists is kind of what I like to call it, where he has a poem about, for example,

from early in his career about how

you know when the weather is changing. And it's 25 lines, something like that, 30 lines. And it's

basically a list of reasons that you know that the weather is changing, almost all of them

...