KAY RYAN: Next U.S. poet laureate
My friend and poetry teacher Winston Fuller sends along news for MountainWord — that a relatively unknown poet, a native Californian named Kay Ryan, has been named the new U.S. poet laureate.
He put me onto a New York Times story by Patricia Cohen:
(click it) “Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate”
It’s a one-year term that begins this fall.
The Times piece is accompanied by several of her poems, a Times Topics on her, and a Paper Cuts blog by David Orr. “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” is my favorite poem of hers so far. Her writing seems almost as accessible as Ted Kooser’s and as pared down as Emily Dickinson’s.
Ryan described herself recently as a “modern hermit.” She’s won many awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000, in 2004, but remained relatively unknown until last week.
Here’s a list of some of Ryan’s books (demand for her work jumped after the announcement):
The Niagara River
Say Uncle
Elephant Rocks
… and an appearance she made on Newshour in 2006:
