Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate of the US

Kay Ryan Rocks!

"Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes...."

from http://blog.92y.org/index.php/weblog/2008/08/ :

Where do you typically find the germ for a poem?
The world doesn’t fit me right, so now and then I have to push a new bulge into it or tighten it up someplace. I do this with poems, which can actually create or absorb space.

You are perhaps best known for compact, decisive lyrics. What are your thoughts about longer poems and sequences?
Actually I’m in the process of writing a long poem, or a sequence; I don’t distinguish between the two. It will be made up of all my short poems.

Some of your poems are quite funny. How, if at all, do you think about your audience’s potential reaction when you write a poem?
When one is writing a poem it isn’t the kind of condition in which it’s possible to think about an “audience’s potential reaction.” Later one does, of course, and one thinks, “That’s so funny; I wonder if anyone else will think so?”

What advice would you give to a young writer seeking to establish herself as a poet?
I would advise the young writer to get enough education so that she can secure a job that pays enough so that she only ever has to work part time if she’s careful with money.

"Chop," from her most recent collection, "The Niagara River" (2005):

The bird

walks down

the beach along

the glazed edge

the last wave

reached. His

each step makes

a perfect stamp--

smallish, but as

sharp as an

emperor's chop.

Stride, stride,

goes the emperor

down his wide

mirrored promenade

the sea bows

to repolish.

from wikipedia:
Ryan's awards include a 1995 award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation,the 2000 Union League Poetry Prize, the 2001 Maurice English Poetry Award, a fellowship in 2001 from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her poems have been included in three Pushcart Prize anthologies,^[20][21][22] and have been selected four times for The Best American Poetry;"Outsider Art" was selected by Harold Bloom for The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997. Since 2006, Ryan has served as one of fourteen Chancellors of The Academy of American Poets.

Kay Ryan (left) and Carol Adair, who also teaches English at the College of Marin, were married in a ceremony at San Francisco City Hall in 2004.