KAY RYAN APPOINTED U.S. POET LAUREATE
Kay Ryan interview with Michael Krasny | KQED San Francisco
Kay Ryan
Photo: Jane Hirshfield
The Library of Congress announced Thursday the appointment of Kay Ryan as the 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2008-2009.
Kay Ryan; Library of Congress
The native Californian will take up her duties Oct. 16 by reading her work at the opening of the Library’s annual literary series. She also will be a featured guest at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in the Poetry pavilion Sept. 27 on the National Mall.
“Kay Ryan is a distinctive and original voice within the rich variety of contemporary American poetry,” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said a statement. “She writes easily understandable short poems on improbable subjects. Within her compact compositions there are many surprises in rhyme and rhythm and in sly wit pointing to subtle wisdom.”
Ryan was born in 1945 in San Jose and was raised in the Central Valley of California, where her father was an oil driller. In 1971, she moved to Marin County, where she still lives. For 33 years, Ryan has taught remedial English at the College of Marin.
“In our home, something like being a poet would be thought of as putting on airs,” Ryan told the NewsHour in June 2006. “It would be embarrassingly pretentious, and educated, and snobbish. And so that, as a writer, I’ve always been very sensitive to not being pretentious and to being sure that I didn’t put on airs. I mean, it’s all right to be intelligent and to use every possible aspect of language, but never to be pompous.”
Her poems, which are often brief and ponderous, are also characterized by their wit and unusual perspectives and wisdom. She counts William Carlos Williams, Philip Larkin and John Donne among her favorites.
“Silence means a great deal to me, and I’ve learned to distinguish a great number of forms of silence,” Ryan said. “My poems talk about a palpable silence, that creamy, latexy kind of silence that we know, even when we’re experiencing it as a giant luxury, like a dream luxury.”
Ryan is the author of six books of poetry. Her awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation; a Guggenheim fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2006.
“It’s kind of a thrill to go from nothing to this,” she told The Associated Press. “This is probably going to keep me so occupied that it will discourage any contact with the deeper mind. But my deeper mind needs a break.”
Ryan told the AP that she was “delighted and surprised” to receive the job. Upon hearing that the Library of Congress had called, she thought to herself, “I can’t have that many overdue books.”
Ryan succeeds Charles Simic, who served for one year.
© 2008 by PBS.Org
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KAY RYAN: A Brief Bio
Kay Ryan was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from UCLA.
Ryan has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005); Say Uncle (2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), which was a finalist for both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Strangely Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983).
About her work, J. D. McClatchy has said: “Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today’s literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.”
Ryan’s awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.
Ryan’s poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. In 2008, Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in California.
© 2008 Poets.Org
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Kay Ryan’s widely praised The Niagara River won the 2005 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
