Tuesday, July 22, 2008

News at Eleven: "I thought I might take it upon myself

to prevent all bad poetry from being published during my reign," she [Kay Ryan] says, speaking by phone from her home north of San Francisco, when asked if there is any special project she plans to undertake in her new role.

Then she tries to explain how a poet laureateship could happen to a 62-year-old woman who grew up in the small towns of central California ("the glamour-free zone"), learned to hide behind the role of class clown, got rejected by her college's poetry club, committed to writing poetry as a vocation only after she'd turned 30, refused to have anything to do with creative writing classes and has lived a deliberately quiet life in which she didn't cultivate connections within the literary establishment.

from The Washington Post: Verse of the Turtle
also The Washington Post: A Small Taste of Kay Ryan

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