The American Library of Congress announced on Thursday that the award-winning Californian poet Kay Ryan will become the 16th poet laureate, this approaching autumn. The self-described “modern hermit” who writes Emily Dickinson-style metaphysical poetry will receive a $40,000 salary for her one year stint as the acme of the US poetry world.
Ryan was born in 1945 in California and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She would go on to receive a bachelor’s and master’s degree from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles).
She was said to have been ‘delighted and surprised’ when the Library of Congress had contacted her and thought at first she had forgotten to return some overdue books.
Her favourite poets include the modernist poet William Carlos Williams, the English novelist Philip Larkin and John Donne the Jacobean who is catagorised as being part of the 17th century metaphysical poetic movement.
Kay Ryan’s poetry style is of a reflectively short but profound and seriocomical nature which focuses on both the confines of our lives and the illimitable vastness of the universe and existence. She has published a number of works including The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005); Say Uncle (2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), which incidentally 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).
Her poems have also been printed in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review and Parnassus, to name but a few.
Today she lives with her partner Carol Adair in Fairfax, California.
For an example of her work visit Poetry Magazine.
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