Marin County poet Kay Ryan will become the 16th Poet Laureate of the of the United States, according to the New York Times.

In a 1999 essay for Dark Horse, Dana Gioia — California poet and now the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts — wrote of Ryan:

Over the past five years no new poet has so deeply impressed me with her imaginative flair or originality as Kay Ryan. I first saw her poems almost by accident. In 1994 a small publisher gave me a review copy of Flamingo Watching along with several other recent books. No critical fanfare accompanied the slender volume, and I had no special reason to think it possessed singular merit. But given the work of an unfamiliar poet, I always read a few poems, and I was immediately struck by the unusual compression and density of Ryan’s work. I particularly enjoyed the evident delight she took in playing extravagant games with small units of language. Genuine wit is rare in contemporary poetry but rarer still combined with brevity. I made no immediate fuss about Ryan, but I could also never quite bring myself to put Flamingo Watching away on the shelf. I kept picking the book up to read or reread a few more poems. Over the next year their depth of perception, joyful invention, and stylistic authority never failed to fascinate and delight me.

I realize now that I was gradually learning how to read Ryan and listen to the intricate and ingenious conversations her poems have among themselves. Despite all the fashionable blather about individual voices, most poets use and reuse the common parlance of the age with only a slight personal accent. One can read most new poets quite easily. But a genuinely original poet requires some recalibration of our ear and eye–both inner and outer. Ryan’s work may not seem difficult, but it is. She challenges the reader in unusual ways. She is not obscure but sly, dense, elliptical, and suggestive. She plays with her readers–not maliciously or gratuitously but to rouse them from conventional response and expectation.

Read more at Dana Gioia online.

Learn more about your new Poet Laureate:

• • Read some of her poems at the NYT.
• • View the excerpt from the DVD The Poet’s View above.
• • Explore her books: The Niagara River, Flamingo Watching, Say Uncle, Elephant Rocks
• • Read a profile at the Christian Science Monitor.
• • View a short discussion and reading at The NewsHour online.
• • Read the official Library of Congress press release announcing Kay Ryan’s appointment as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry
• • Enjoy the deep and delicious Library of Congress “Kay Ryan Online Resources” page. Links to text, audio, video — everything from articles essays by Ryan, to readings and reviews, to a custom Technorati search to help users keep track of blog buzz about the new laureate.