*YES.*
Wednesday 16 July 2008 | someone left a cookie
“Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate” (NYT)
Addendum: I should say that while this is good news for the state of the union (and speaks rather highly for the taste of the current LOC director), it may be bad news for Ms. Ryan, who’s not much of a joiner. I certainly hope she can weather this tour of duty without, I don’t know, say, murdering Dana Gioia.
Then too, perhaps it is a fiendish prank on the part of said director—an appointment designed, with malicious glee, to ensure plenty of shoe-staring humiliation for President McCain when a certified Daughter of Bilitis gets to write and then read his inaugural poem.
A final, but potentially quite serious, drawback to the PLOTUS gig is that for reclusive types it’s historically been lousy in terms of output. I refer specifically to my late Russian’s infamous claim that he wrote nothing during the entire year but a single couplet, which I now reproduce as a cautionary tale for Ms. Ryan. Though admittedly a couplet from her is as good as a Collected Poems from some other people I could name. But won’t.
I sit at my desk;
My life’s grotesque.
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A victory for the West Coast at last.
But can you actually be an ‘outsider’ when Dana Gioia is your champion? Outside what exactly?
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Obnoxious editor: Touché! Yet even Mr. Gioia must have his reckless, rebellious days, days when he is not himself, days on which he says You know what, to hell with my instinctive conservatism, I’m gonna go nuts! Bust out a little. Why I’ll just, I’ll, I’ll, what I’ll do is, I know! I’ll read some poems by this here lesbian language-driven poet! Why not, eh? What can it hurt?? Because that’s the wacky kinda guy I am.
You know, of the devil’s party without knowing it and all that. Then the next day he wakes up with a hangover, in someone else’s clothes, and having mysteriously gone over his credit card limit. And also somehow having blurbed Kay Ryan without remembering when.
Having said all that, you’re totally right: it’s absolutely a reverse imprimatur, in my book (um, that would be my unpublished book of course), when Gioia likes your work.