For the past year, Kay Ryan has been serving as America’s 16th poet laureate, tapped by the librarian of Congress to be ambassador for American poetry. Profile, with poems written and spoken, from Voice of America.
The august marble-and-gilt halls of the Library of Congress, where Ryan has her official headquarters, seem an unlikely place for someone raised in what she calls the “glamour-free, ocean-free, hot, stinky, oil-rich, potato-rich” San Joaquin Valley of California. But then, growing up, Ryan didn’t want to be poet.
“It [to declare oneself a poet] seemed like putting on airs,” she says. “It seemed self-absorbed. It seemed like something that my oil well driller father wouldn’t understand at all and that my mother would disapprove of, because it was just showing off.”
Ryan nearly turned down the offer to become U.S. poet laureate. She says she wanted to protect her privacy and keep writing without being distracted by the job’s many public duties.
“I think poetry is indestructible, and I don’t worry about it, and I don’t think it needs the protection of me or the advocacy of me or anyone.”
Ryan likens poetry to gold coins: “You can lose it in the couch, or in the ground, or anywhere and when it’s dug up its going to be valuable, so that real poetry utterly protects itself, [and] takes care of itself.”
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