Sherry Chandler

Kay Ryan named Poet Laureate

From the New York Times:

When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1994, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to Kay Ryan’s poetry until I heard her read at West Chester last year. I found her reading style wonderfully wry and funny and her work just wonderful.

I also sat next to her at one of the readings at that conference but alas, none of her talent rubbed off though I rubbed shoulders. I could no more match Ryan’s minimalism than I could match Naomi Nye’s expansiveness. But I am very very glad both poets are in my world.

Here is Ryan’s page at Poets.org, where you can read some of her work if you don’t already know it. I see that they have “Home to Roost,” her famous 9/11 poem, except that it’s not, as David Orr points out in the current issue of Poetry:

The only problem, of course, is that “Home to Roost” was written prior to September 11 and has nothing whatsoever to do with the attack, its aftermath, or the now-famous invocation of this specific phrase by Jeremiah Wright. Ryan enjoys tweaking clichés, but when a particular cliché is thrown into political relief—as often happens—then her poem tends to follow. It’ll be another five years before she can call this one her own again, which probably annoys her endlessly.

It’s good that Ryan has been named Poet Laureate because she is a fine and “accessible” poet, but also because she’s a woman. As Amy King points out here, Ryan will be only the 10th woman out of 45 poets to hold the office since 1937.

1945-1946 — Louise Bogan
1948-1949 — Leonie Adams
1949-1950 — Elizabeth Bishop
1971-1973 — Josephine Jacobsen
1981-1982 — Maxine Kumin
1985-1986 — Gwendolyn Brooks
1992-1993 — Mona Van Duyn
1993-1995 — Rita Dove
2003-2004 — Louise Glück
2008 — Kay Ryan

Here’s the best photo I’ve seen of Kay Ryan. I stole it from Poesy Galore:

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