ll, opening the Library's annual literary series in October with a
reading of his work.
Stanley Kunitz, who occupied the Chair of Poetry at the Library
from 1974 through 1976 as Consultant in Poetry (before the title
was changed to “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry” with the
passage in 1985 of P.L. 99-194), was born in Worcester,
Massachusetts, in 1905. His ten books of poetry include
Passing
Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (W.W. Norton, 1995),
which won the National Book Award;
Next-to-Last Things: New
Poems and Essays (1985);
The Poems of Stanley Kunitz,
1928-1978, which won the Pulitzer Prize;
The
Testing-Tree (1971); and
Intellectual Things (1930). He
also co-translated
Orchard Lamps by Ivan Drach (1978),
Story under Full Sail by Andrei Voznesensky (1974), and
Poems of Akhmatova (1973), and edited
The Essential
Blake (1987),
Poems of John Keats (1964), and
The
Yale Series of Younger Poets (1969-77).
His other honors include the National Medal of the Arts (presented
to him by President Clinton in 1993), the Bollingen Prize, a Ford
Foundation grant, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Harvard’s
Centennial Medal, the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Poetry
Award, a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the
Arts, and the Shelley Memorial Award. He was designated State Poet
of New York, and is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of
American Poets. A founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Poets House in New York City, he
taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia
University. He lives in New York City and in Provincetown,
Massachusetts.
2001-2003
Billy Collins
On June 21, 2001, Billy Collins was appointed as the Library's new
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. In 2002, he was appointed to a
second term, continuing through 2003.
He is Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, City
University of New York, where he has taught for the past 30 years.
He is also a writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College and
served as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library.
Billy Collins' books of poetry include:
·
Sailing Alone
Around the Room (2002)
·
Picnic,
Lightning (1998)
·
The Art of
Drowning (1995), which was a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
finalist
·
Questions
About Angels (1991), a National Poetry Series selection by
Edward Hirsch
·
The Apple That
Astonished Paris (1988)
·
Video
Poems (1980)
·
Pokerface
(1977)
His other awards and honors include:
the Oscar Blumenthal Prize
the Bess Hokin Prize
the Frederick Bock Prize
the Levinson Prize
New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship
Guggenheim Foundation fellowship
2003-2004
Louise Glück
On August 28, 2003, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington
announced the appointment of Louise Glück as the Library's 12th
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. She will take up her duties in
the fall, opening the Library's annual literary series on Tuesday,
Oct. 21 with a reading of her work.
Louise Glück is the author of nine books of poetry, including 'The
Seven Ages' (Ecco Press, 2001); 'Vita Nova' (1999), which was
awarded The New Yorker magazine's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands
(1996); 'The Wild Iris' (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize
and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award;
'Ararat' (1990), which received the Library of Congress's Rebekah
Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; and 'The Triumph of
Achilles' (1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle
Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry
Society of America's Melville Kane Award. Louise Glück has also
published a collection of essays, 'Proofs and Theories: Essays on
Poetry' (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for
Nonfiction. This fall, Sarabande Books will publish in chapbook
form a new, six-part poem, 'October.'
In 2001 Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in
Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his
or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for
Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), the
M.I.T. Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the
Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and from the National
Endowment for the Arts.
She is a member of the American Academy & Institute of Arts
& Letters, and in 1999 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy
of American Poets. In 2003 she was named as the new judge for the
Yale Series of Younger Poets and will serve in that position
through 2007.
A resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Glück has taught at
Williams College since 1983 and teaches courses in the writing of
poetry and in contemporary poetry as the Margaret Bundy Scott
Senior Lecturer in English.
2004-2006
Ted Kooser
(1939- ) Kooser, who was born in Ames, Iowa, received his
bachelor's degree from Iowa State and his master's in English from
the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is the author of 10
collections of poetry, including 'Delights & Shadows,' which
won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. His other honors include two
National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Pushcart Prize and
the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia. He is a professor in the
English department at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln
2006-2007
Donald Hall
Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He
received his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1951, and in
1953 his bachelor's in literature from Oxford University. For the
past thirty years he has lived on Eagle Pond Farm in rural New
Hampshire, in the house where his grandmother and mother were born.
He has two children from his first marriage and five grandchildren.
Hall was married for 23 years to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in
1995. In 1998, he published 'Without' (Houghton Mifflin), a
collection of poems expressing his grief over Kenyon's death: 'The
mosaic of a whole period, with all its inner moods and its physical
accessories, is masterfully accomplished' (New York Review of
Books).
Hall has published 15 books of poetry, beginning with 'Exiles and
Marriages' in 1955. Earlier this year, he published 'White Apples
and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006' (Houghton
Mifflin), a volume of his essential life's work. Among his books
for children, 'Ox-Cart Man' won the Caldecott Medal. His 20 books
of prose include 'Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories' (2003),
'The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon' (2005), and a
collection of his essays about poetry, 'Breakfast Served Any Time
All Day' (2003). He has written extensively about life in New
Hampshire ― 'Seasons at Eagle Pond' (1987) and 'Here at Eagle Pond'
(2000). He is currently working on a third volume, 'Eagle Pond,'
scheduled for publication in 2007.
For his poetry, Donald Hall received the Marshall/Nation Award in
1987 for his 'The Happy Man'; both the National Book Critics Circle
Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1988 for 'The One
Day'; the Lily Prize for Poetry in 1994; and two Guggenheim
Fellowships. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
2007-2008
Charles Simic
Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia on May 9, 1938. His childhood
was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris
with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his
father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago,
where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway.
Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an
office at the
Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the
U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963. He earned his bachelor's
degree from New York University in 1966. From 1966 to 1974 he wrote
and translated poetry, and he also worked as an editorial assistant
for
Aperture, a photography magazine. He married fashion
designer Helen Dubin in 1964. They have two children. He has been a
U.S. citizen since 1971 and lives in Strafford, N.H.
Simic is the author of 19 books of poetry. He is also an essayist,
translator, editor and professor emeritus of creative writing and
literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught
for 34 years. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for his
book of prose poems
The World Doesn't End (1989). His 1996
collection,
Walking the Black Cat, was a finalist for the
National Book Award for Poetry. In 2005 he won the Griffin Prize
for
Selected Poems: 1963-200 . Simic's latest book of
poetry,
That Little Something, was published in April
2008.
Simic held a MacArthur Fellowship from 1984-1989, and has also held
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Arts. He has received the Edgar Allan Poe Award,
the PEN Translation Prize and awards from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He
was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000.
On August 2, 2007, the same day he was appointed Poet Laureate,
Simic received the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy
of American Poets for 'outstanding and proven mastery in the art of
poetry.'
2008-2009
Kay Ryan
Dr. Billington said: 'Kay Ryan is a distinctive and original voice
within the rich variety of contemporary American poetry,'
Billington said. 'She writes easily understandable short poems on
improbable subjects. Within her compact compositions there are many
surprises in rhyme and rhythm and in sly wit pointing to subtle
wisdom.'
Patricia Gray, coordinator of the Library’s Poetry and Literature
Center, noted that although Ryan’s appointment as Laureate may
disrupt her quiet life temporarily, her career path is likely to
inspire poets everywhere who work independently, forgoing
time-consuming career tracks and more remunerative positions so
they can lead lives that nourish their writing.
Ryan was born in 1945 in San Jose, Calif., and grew up in the San
Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Her father was an oil well
driller and sometime-prospector. She received both bachelor’s and
master’s degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Since 1971, Ryan has lived in Marin County. Her partner of 30 years
is Carol Adair.
For more than 30 years, Ryan limited her professional
responsibilities to the part-time teaching of remedial English at
the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., thus leaving much of her
life free for 'a lot of mountain bike riding plus the idle
maunderings poets feed upon.' She said at one point that she has
never taken a creative writing class, and in a 2004 interview in
The Christian Science Monitor, she noted, 'I have tried to live
very quietly, so I could be happy.'
In her poems Ryan enjoys re-examining the beauty of everyday
phrases and mining the cracks in common human experience. Unlike
many poets writing today, she seldom writes in the first person.
She has said, 'I don’t use ‘I’ because the personal is too hot and
sticky for me to work with. I like the cooling properties of the
impersonal.'
She describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both
the writer and the reader: 'Poems are transmissions from the depths
of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater
extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is
making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal
sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it
whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in
you, that it is the most special kind of reading.'
Ryan’s poems are characterized by the deft use of unusual kinds of
slant and internal rhyming–which she has referred to as
'recombinant rhyme'–in combination with strong, exact rhymes and
even puns. The poems are peppered with wit and philosophical
questioning and rely on short lines, often no more than two to
three words each. She has said of her ascetic preferences, 'An
almost empty suitcase–that’s what I want my poems to be. A few
things. The reader starts taking them out, but they keep
multiplying.' Because her craft is both exacting and playfully
elastic, it is possible for both readers who like formal poems and
readers who like free verse to find her work rewarding.
John Barr, president of The Poetry Foundation, said: 'Halfway into
a Ryan poem, one is ready for either a joke or a profundity;
typically it ends in both. Before we know it the poem arrives at
some unexpected, deep insight that likely will alter forever the
way we see that thing.'
Ryan has written six books of poetry, plus a limited edition
artist’s book, along with a number of essays. Her books are:
'Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends' (1983), 'Strangely Marked Metal'
(Copper Beech, 1985), 'Flamingo Watching' (Copper Beech, 1994),
'Elephant Rocks' (Grove Press,1996), 'Say Uncle' (Grove Press,
2000), 'Believe It or Not!' (2002, Jungle Garden Press, edition of
125 copies), and 'The Niagara River' (Grove Press, 2005).
Her awards include the Gold Medal for poetry, 2005, from the San
Francisco Commonwealth Club; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The
Poetry Foundation in 2004; a Guggenheim fellowship the same year; a
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the Maurice
English Poetry Award in 2001; the Union League Poetry Prize in
2000; and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1995. She has won
four Pushcart Prizes and has been selected four different years for
the annual volumes of the Best American Poetry. Her poems have been
widely reprinted and internationally anthologized. Since 2006, she
has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Source from：
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate.html
