(From the publisher) Every day people tune in to The Writer's Almanac on public radio and hear Garrison Keillor read them a poem. And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by the narrator for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m."

The title Good Poems comes from common literary parlance. For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having written a good poem. Somebody else can worry about greatness. Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" is a good poem, and so is James Wright's "A Blessing." Regular people love those poems. People read them aloud at weddings; people send them by e-mail.

Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendence. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.

About the author

	© Minnesota Public Radio

I was born in Anoka, Minnesota in 1942, the third of six kids in a Plymouth Brethren family. My mother's people were Scots who came over from Glasgow in 1906, my grandpa and grandma and six little kids; my grandpa Keillor came to Anoka in 1880 from New Brunswick, a family of farmers and ship's carpenters and clerics, some of them Loyalists escaped north from the American Revolution, some Yorkshire farmers who arrived around 1770 to take over the lands taken away from the French. My wife Jenny's people are part Connecticut Yankee, part Swedish from Smaaland. Our little girl looks Swedish but has a big sunny personality, which she certainly doesn't get from my side, believe me.

I grew up along the West River Road in Brooklyn Park, went to Anoka High School, then the University of Minnesota, where I was an English major, and worked at the Minnesota Daily and at the University radio station, KUOM. I graduated in 1966 and went to work for Minnesota Public Radio in 1969 (my last job interview, I trust). I did the early morning shift, which I quit a couple times for stints of writing. In the summer of 1974, A Prairie Home Companion began as a Saturday afternoon live variety show. First from Macalester College in Saint Paul, then various auditoriums and theaters, and, starting in 1978, from the present site, the World (renamed Fitzgerald) Theater. The show began life as a sort of folk music revue and by 1980, when it began national broadcasts, had pretty much found its current form. I brought the show to an end in 1987, from sheer exhaustion, and soon regretted this, and resumed it in 1989 in New York, from the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn, as the American Radio Company of the Air. Despite attempts to strike out in new directions, it was still the same show, so we brought it back to St. Paul and in 1993 resumed the name A Prairie Home Companion.

Along with the show, I carry on a parallel life as a writer. I write an occasional essay for Time. I've produced some story collections, a couple novels, a couple kids' books. My literary ambitions have cooled a good deal since college, when we all longed to be great and to win big prizes. Now I look on writing as simply something I do every day, as some people attend Mass and others tend gardens, so I sit down and write. I'd like to be a man of letters, capable of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism, and I have a long way to go. If I could ever write a full-length play, I'd be a happy man. But meanwhile I've managed to support myself by writing, which was my big goal as a student at the U, impossible as it seemed at the time, and that gives me a certain satisfaction. Writing is pure entrepreneurship and a great way of life. And then, if you do a radio show every Saturday, you have a built-in social life. So it's a pretty good deal.