From the PNA

Pulitzer Prize winner provides no-cost poetry column.

A brief, no-cost, weekly poetry column is now available for your use, and we encourage you to take advantage of it. The column is written by U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, who introduced the idea at the November NAM meeting in Washington. Kooser's wife, Kathleen Rutledge, is the editor of the Lincoln (Nebr.) Journal Star and the couple has long hoped to reintroduce poetry to newspaper readers. With the help of The Library of Congress, The Poetry Foundation of Chicago and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, they were able to realize their dream.

This easy-to-access column is available at www.americanlifeinpoetry.org. New columns are posted each week and old columns are archived at the site and may be used as alternatives if desired. All permissions and copyright issues have been addressed.

You will be asked to register at the website, for tracking purposes. The columns must be reprinted as published on the Web site because of important permission and acknowledgment language. You may either download the weekly columns directly from the site or request that they be emailed to you.

Poetry was a staple of newspapers for the first 200 years of our country and people clipped poems for their scapbooks, mailed them to friends, memorized them and used them in the schools. This is a great opportunity to add value for your readers, offering them fresh, enjoyable, understandable poems in a format that won't take up much space. You won't regret it.

Click here to read the article about Kooser that appeared in the Lincoln Journal Star on April 5, 2005.