"Poems bite. And my poems are bitey."

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Kay Ryan, our new poet laurete. Time has an interesting little piece on Ryan and the laureteship in general.

I especially like this observation from Billy Collins, whose work I've always enjoyed: "'Suddenly you're asked to stop looking at specifics — I mean, I write about saltshakers and knives and forks — and talk like a politician,' Collins says. 'You're asked to leave right side of brain and live in left side.'"

Then there are a couple of great quotations from Ryan herself: "'But I'm ready to be interrupted,' she says. 'I'm getting tired of myself, tired of inflicting myself on myself. I'm ready to inflict myself on others.'"

You know how you know she's good people? She talks about happily teaching developmental writing for thirty years--one of the hardest jobs is academia: "'It was mainly second-language students and students who lost their way in school," Ryan says. 'They wanted something that I could help them get: an understanding of the basic elements of grammar, pronouns, those pesky apostrophes. The goal was to write an effective paragraph that was coherent and well supported. We aspired to the semicolon, but that rarely happened.'"

As the article makes clear, though, the job isn't exactly without pressure, pressure that Ryan is already feeling: "But the stress of becoming America's ambassador of poetry is already keeping her up at night. 'I just lie in bed rigidly,' she says, 'and I think about how I have moved from a condition where the world can humiliate me to one where I can humiliate myself. And let down other poets.'"

The title from the post, by the way, is another quotation from Ryan--a particularly fanstastic one, I think. What a great way to describe to students how poetic language works.