The Diseased Laureate

I linked to a poem of Kay Ryan's not too long ago. She's a favorite of mine. So I'm especially pleased to hear that she's being named poet laureate, even though poet laureate seems like a position with no real benefits or power. This is great:

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”