Hey, Kay Ryan is the new poet laureate. Not a bad choice at all. Christopher wrote a nice column about her when she came to Seattle Arts & Lectures in 2005:

The idea most people have of poets is that their job is to identify and distill the meaning of human experience or the heaviness of being alive or whatever. “I loathe the idea of the poet,” Ryan said. Which is why it’s hard to find heavy poetic intent in Ryan’s poems. “I hate significance and I really hate added significance,” she said, talking about “Home to Roost,” a poem she’d submitted to a magazine before 9/11 that, after 9/11, seemed stupidly rich with importance: “The chickens / are circling and / blotting out the / day. The sun is / bright, but the / chickens are in / the way. Yes, / the sky is dark / with chickens, / dense with them. / They turn and / then they turn / again. These / are the chickens / you let loose / one at a time / and small—/ various breeds. / Now they have / come home / to roost—all / the same kind / at the same speed.” She pulled the poem from consideration for publication because, at the time, you couldn’t publish a poem about chickens in the clear sky coming back to get you without everyone thinking you were obviously aiming at a Big Point.

Here is another poem of hers Christopher mentioned in passing, via The New York Times.

Blandeur

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

That’s a great poem.