Kay Ryan

"Poetry itself isn't really one of the do-gooding things," says Kay Ryan, the U.S.'s new poet laureate. "It may help us sometimes. It's also a very bity thing, a ferocious thing. I think sometimes the role of poet laureate gets so confused with being a person who does good that we can sort of start thinking that poetry is a social tool in some way. I'm terribly selfish about good poetry. If I find a poet who excites me, what I want to do is not tell anybody...I mean I'm exaggerating. I think that the real nature of one's relationship with a poem is that that poem, if it's important to you, is so interior it's almost frightening. It's a very private thing, and it almost has nothing to do with the external world, even though we use poems in large public ways. When you read a poem that really affects you, in a sense you feel you're half creating it, because you feel, 'oh, how could he know that about me?' And so there's this deep exchange that doesn't have much to do with the larger world of public language."

This excerpt is taken from a conversation with WBUR's Tom Ashbrook in which Ryan speaks about her now job, shares the unique joys and difficulties of her form, and reads a few of her poems. Here's one called "Patience," courtesy of the Academy of American Poets:

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.