World Class Poetry Blog

What Kay Ryan’s Appointment As Poet Laureate Really Means
30 July 2008, the poet @ 8:56 pm

I said I would offer some words on the appointment of Kay Ryan to the poet laureate position. I must say that it is rather surprising given that she isn’t all that well known. I mean, there are other poets far more well known who could have been selected, which begs the question, why Ryan?

If we can say that the poet laureate position is a reflection of the soul of the nation then it begs the question: Why Kay Ryan? Why? Why? Why?

Who Appoints The Poet Laureate Anyway?
Billy Collins said the question he answered the most when he served as poet laureate was who appointed him. I think he actually said that he cleared up the notion that the president is the Appointer. Well, he may be the decider, but he doesn’t decide who is appointed to the poet laureate position. That honor is reserved for the Librarian of Congress.

But what difference does it matter who appoints the poet laureate? I think it matters a great deal because whoever does the appointing will undoubtedly bring to the table their own set of preferences and prejudices. I can’t imagine who the poet laureate might be if George W. Bush were president. Dr. Seuss? Dick Cheney’s cousin? That Greek guy, what’s his name?

Facetiousness aside, the current Librarian of Congress is Dr. James H. Billington. He was sworn in to that position in 1987. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, he went on to graduate valedictorian of the 1960 Princeton graduating class. He received his doctorate from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has taught at both Princeton and Harvard and was the director, for a time, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In addition to all of that, he has served on the editorial advisory boards for both Foreign Affairs and Theology Today. He is also currently on the Board of the Center for Theological Inquiry and is a member in good standing of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In a word, he’s no intellectual lightweight.

All of these positions, past and present, serve to inform Dr. Billington on his poetic preferences as well as his obligated appointments. But who appoints him? Well, that would be the president of the United States, with the advice and consent of the Senate. And to answer your question before you ask it, No, G.W. had nothing to do with. Since Dr. Billington was appointed in 1987, it would have been the Gipper, Ronald “Trickle Down” Reagan.

While there is no term length established for the position by law, it is tradition that the position be held by life, so there is no real pressure to lean in any direction politically. But you can be assured that tradition and history play a big role in the duties and decisions of the office, which of course, tend to be on the conservative side. No one in a traditional role in U.S. life would dare to stray too far from an honored tradition. That would be anathema to the sensibilities of the public spirit.

Poets Laureate Since 1987

Ron Silliman likes to point out that there has only been one poet laureate who wasn’t a member of Silliman’s pejoratively-monikered “School of Quietude” - the hero of postmodern poetics, William Carlos Williams. If I believed in the SofQ, I’d agree with him. Tradition and history seems to be the primary relation to almost all of the poets who have served in that capacity. I think we can count Amiri Baraka and Sharon Olds out of the running.

When Dr. Billington took over as Librarian of Congress, Robert Penn Warren was the poet laureate of the U.S. He was the first person to serve under that title, which had previously been called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He was appointed in 1986 and served through 1987. That would mean Dr. Billington’s first appointment would have been Richard Wilbur. He served for one year and was replaced by Howard Nemerov, who served from 1988-1990. Both poets are firmly entrenched in the New Formalism school of poetics popularized by the current head of the NEA Dana Gioia and a few others. You can’t really get any more conservative than that.

Dr. Billington also appointed another New Formalist poet in 1992 by the name of Mona Van Duyn. After that, during the Clinton years, came a string of more liberal poets, but none of them were so liberal as to break completely with recognized traditions. Their politics may have been liberal, but their poetic philosophies were entrenched in historical traditions as recognized broadly by academics who would know.

In 2001, though, something happened. Dr. Billington began appointing a different type of poet to the position of poet laureate. The shift wasn’t a major shift. It wasn’t a shift in poetics per se, but a shift in focus. The first poet laureate to serve after the World Trade Center attack was Billy Collins, who has been likened to Robert Frost so many times you would think he was Frost’s only son. Collins was the first recipient of the Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry and has been an inspiration to thousands of other poets who aspire to be the Jerry Seinfeld of poetics. Collins was an uncanny instigator of a movement. Reading Collins’ poems is like sail boating with Bozo the Clown and his satirical other.

Following Collins, we have quite a slate of light verse operators who don’t really write in a strict, traditional “light verse”, but who tend to write in a witty style that is admired by people who don’t much care for the “heavier” topics like death, sexuality, and violence. Here are Collins’ successors:

• Louise Gluck - 2003-2004
• Ted Kooser - 2004-2006
• Donald Hall - 2006-2007
• Charles Simic - 2006-2007

I’m not sure if this trend has more to do with who our current president is or if it has more to do with the tragic consequence of our Federal government allowing a grab bag full of lunatics through the immigration loopholes. Maybe Dr. Billington just thought it was time for a laugh or maybe he chooses his poets laureate on the basis of some odd sort of reflection of the current presidential administration and the mood of the country. But each of these poets, except for Collins and Simic, and many of the previous ones, represent one of two subcultures within the macro-culture of America. They represent either the Ivy League set or the rural heartland. One of these cultures, the Ivy League, represents the part of America that is beyond reach of most Americans, but that also represents a shiny veneer of traditional values. The other represents that part of America that is accessible, but is raw and dirt-filled. Charles Simic is neither, but he has another problem.

When he was appointed to the poet laureate position, Charles Simic said that he didn’t need to promote poetry. Nevermind that is the chief responsibility of the poet laureate position. He felt it wasn’t necessary because he had attended a poetry reading with 740 attendees. Evidently, that was a large gathering for him. I recently read an interview with Sam Hamill who said he reads to audiences of 3,000 people. Maybe we should appoint him to be the poet laureate.

All of that aside, however, there is a strain of commonality among the poets selected for the poet laureate position: They have all been winners of either the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship or a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and most of them have won both. Ryan also is the recipient of both fellowships. It’s almost as if these awards are precursors to the laureateship position, which would exclude many poets on the basis of style alone.

Simic may have been the most successful of all the poet laureates poets laureate. He sought to do nothing in that position and he accomplished his goal. The only thing that could have made him more representative of our presidential culture is for him to have worked extra hard to screw something up. But if the poet laureate position isn’t a reflection of who is in the highest office in the land then it at least is a reflection of the people who elect the highest ranking lawbreaker. The poet laureate may not be our soul, but he represents it like the flag represents freedom, only maybe more truthfully.

These Are Times That Try Men’s Souls - Not!

We live in a Billy Collins culture. There is a war going on, but in the heartland you wouldn’t know it. I read an article in my local newspaper a couple of weeks ago that said our president has taken more vacation days than any other president in history. The Great Decider, war hero, liberator of unappreciative sheepherders, Dick Gepetto’s wooden boy. And the rest of the country is smoking and joking, playing golf on Fridays, channel surfing in their underwear, and generally oblivious to anything going on outside of their living rooms. At least, they were until the beginning of this year when fuel prices started going up. Now, suddenly, they realize that it’s time to sell the SUV.

This it folks: America, land of the free and the brave. Only the brave believe that war anywhere and everywhere is necessary as long as someone else foots the bill and breaks a sweat. Who, me? Oh, no, I’m too good and important.

They may not be saying it, but they are thinking it and their actions reflect it. And this is the Simic mentality. We don’t need to promote poetry. Even if that’s what I’m supposed to do. It’ll promote itself. And the war will win itself. Just ask John McCain.

For all practical purposes, I don’t see the appointment of Kay Ryan being too far different from that of Billy Collins and Charles Simic. The string of soft poets known for their wit and traditional poetics that have followed on the heels of Collins, who is really a bit of a parody of himself much the same way that G.W. is. And here we are, arriving at the place where we choose an “outsider” who is both a lesbian and, seemingly, a poet just like all the others.

Kay Who?
Kay Ryan. Who is she? No one knows. Well, no one except a few of the enlightened ones - Dr. Billington, Dana Gioia, and Carol Adair, her lover.

Now let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: Her poetry is good. There’s no doubt. The little bit that I’ve read in the last week or so has been excellent. I like it. But that’s not what the poet laureate is about. We really don’t care if their poetry is good. We hope it is, but it isn’t necessary that it should be. Their position is a promotional position, to make poetry more accessible to the culture and try to get more people to read it. Plain and simple.

But is that all? I don’t think so. I think in a broader sense the position is symbolic. It’s symbolic of the heart of our culture. We are in election year - change. For the first time in history, an African-American is leading a major political party to the final race that will decide who is the most powerful elected leader in the world - change. And you can bet that one of the big issues of the next four year years, especially if Barack Obama is elected, will be the civil rights of homosexuals, and it’s not just one issue. It’s several issues: Gay marriage, gay adoption, openness in the military, and countless other derivative issues that may follow. Change. Big change. And who best to represent that change than “an outsider?”

One other thing that represents change in our culture is the position of Americans on the Iraq War. On the eve of the war in March 2003, most Americans were for it. The polls were something like 60%-70% in favor of it. Today, that figure is reversed. The only people still saying that the Iraq War was the right thing to do are die-hard Republicans who will never admit that they were wrong - and Joe Lieberman. But the rest of us know they were wrong, and some of us were wrong right along with them.

Change. That’s what Americans want right now. We are ready for change. And that’s what Kay Ryan represents, a change. Not a real change. But a symbolic change. A change we can live with. Maybe not the change that needs to happen, but the kind of change that we can negotiate and get a compromise on by some of the people who resist it.

In a real sense, the poet laureate is not a political position. But then, poetry cannot be apolitical. And neither can poets. In a real sense, the position is not political, but in a technical sense - in a soulful, hearty sense - the position is a symbol of our national politics and cultural values. While certain factions within our society have not accepted homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle, most Americans are willing to accept it.

If Barack Obama is elected and the Democrats do get a chance to inflict an exit wound upon the conscience of Traditional Values America then who will be better than a lesbian poet to offer up the victory verses and sing a song of sixpence with her pocket full of wry? Dr. Billington certainly has his finger on the pulse of America and certain parts of it may be losing circulation, but I’m sure he didn’t select Kay Ryan for her sexual orientation, and likely not in spite of it. He likely never gave it a thought. He really didn’t have to. All he really had to do was look into the heart of America and take note of the direction into which it is leaning. He couldn’t have done better if he’d been reading tea leaves.

3 Comments a “What Kay Ryan’s Appointment As Poet Laureate Really Means”

1. Rachel Fox — August 11, 2008 @ 3:24 pm
   

   This is the one I tried to comment on a while back during the log-in business. Billy Collins like Robert Frost? I’m no expert on US poetry…but I have read poems by both and had never thought them similar? Why do people put them together as you say?

2. the poet — August 11, 2008 @ 7:36 pm
   

   Rachel, Billy Collins is generally likened to Robert Frost due to his popularity, not necessarily for similarity in poetic styles. I didn’t really mean to imply that.

3. Rachel Fox — August 12, 2008 @ 1:23 pm
   

   Ah ha! That makes sense…except of course over here Frost is very well-known (certainly a lot of my generation studied Frost in school) whereas Collins is still a good way off that kind of fame. People who follow poetry know him quite well but I don’t think he’s that well-known here outside of what you might call poetry circles.

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