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Current Poet Laureate Pays a Visit

Dodie O'Keefe

Issue date: 2/5/10 Section: Life & Times
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<B>MEET AND GREET:</B> Kay Ryan mingles with students, faculty, staff, and guests after a reading on campus.
Media Credit: Rollins.edu
MEET AND GREET: Kay Ryan mingles with students, faculty, staff, and guests after a reading on campus.
On Thursday, Jan. 28, the esteemed poet Kay Ryan graced the campus with her presence. For those who are not familiar with Kay Ryan, she was born in California and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She attended the University of California in Los Angeles and from there, received a master's degree. Her poetry collections include: Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983), Strangely Marked Metal (1985), Flamingo Watching (1994), Elephant Rocks (1996), Say Uncle (2000), The Niagara River (2005), and her new book entitled The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010).

Kay Ryan has received several awards for her work. These include: the Ruth Lilly Poetry Foundation Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. In addition, Kay's work has been selected for The Best American Poetry four times, and was also included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.

Entertainment Weekly named Kay to the "It List," and her works have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and many other renowned magazines. One of Kay's most recent and possibly most important awards was her appointment in 2008 to the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

To begin her visit, Kay Ryan opened with her poem "Is it Modest?" which she explained, reminds her of Florida for it entails desirable climate characteristics. Next, Kay shared her poem, "Spring" which encompassed Kay's description of how she is uncertain as to why change occurs, as with the changing of the seasons. Kay continued to read her poetry, but when she reached one entitled "When Fishing Fails," she described her interest in murder mysteries. Because of this interest, Kay would take epigraphs from other stories and then base her poems off of them. This was the case with "When Fishing Fails;" Kay took an epigraph from one of her favorite mysteries, Death has no Sportsmen, and wrote a poem. It was evident during Kay's reading and dialogue that she is very funny; there were laughs from the audience for the entirety of her visit.
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