W.S. Merwin will be the next Poet Laureate of the United States, a post I still think of mostly in Donald Hall’s delightful acronym as PLOTUS. Merwin is the third & last of the three poets appointed as special “Bicentennial Consultants” to the Library of Congress to be so named, joining Rita Dove (1993-94) and Louis Glück (2003-2004). Merwin is the 47^th person named to the post since it was created in 1937 as the Library of Congress’ Consultant in Poetry. 38 have been men, 9 women. 45 have been white. 46 have been allied with the School of Quietude, the lone exception still being William Carlos Williams 58 years ago. Williams, alas, had had a stroke that year and was unable to accept the position which then stayed vacant until Randall Jarrell was named in 1956 and the seat was returned to poetry’s equivalent of the Grand Old Party.

I’m not going to belabor this last vestige of SoQ privilege other than to note that it’s consistent with the Obama administration’s ongoing excess of caution. Pulitzer Prize winners who have never been named to the post include the late George Oppen, John Ashbery, Gary Snyder & most recently Rae Armantrout. It is difficult to imagine an institution this far behind the Pulitzer in acknowledging aesthetic diversity, but there you have it.

But if the appointment of the PLOTUS is not about the range of what’s possible in American verse, it still serves a function, the creation of a public advocate for poetry. In this regard, one would have to say that Kay Ryan has been a superb Poet Laureate, perhaps not as great in the role as was Robert Hass, but quite conceivably second only to him. Hass proved an advocate for the environment as well as for poetry and left behind a column in the Washington Post, the most visible public occasion for poetry in a generation, which has only recently disappeared. Since she was yanked out of the relative obscurity of the College of Marin, Ryan has seemed to be everywhere, and has constantly spoken up for poetry without any particular agenda as to what kind. That strikes me as exactly what the laureate should be doing. Kay Ryan got it right.

In this regard, many laureates can be judged positively, whatever their aesthetic and whatever one might think of their writing. Still, there do seem to be at least two kinds of failure that can endanger any person named to the post. The first is a failure of omission. Louise Glück was virtually invisible during her tenure. The post could not have been more vacant. That was a missed opportunity.

The second kind of failure is the PLOTUS as bully, using the position to settle scores. Once one is named as Laureate, one really does bear a responsibility to all of poetry, not just to one’s particular tradition. In this regard, Charles Simic stands alone as the most embarrassing of laureates.

I won’t pretend that I care much for Merwin’s poetry. He is of interest principally as an example of the Lowell-ites of the 1950s who found they could no longer support the retropoetics of New Critical anti-modernism. Of the one-time Baby Brahmins who turned away from the old formalism, I find Merwin less compelling than Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall or even Robert Bly. Still, Merwin wrote one terrific book, 1967’s The Lice, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer nominally given to his next volume, the much blurrier The Carrier of Ladders. I’ve often contrasted his translation of The Poem of the Cid against Paul Blackburn’s of the same poem as evidence as to why & how Blackburn was a great writer.

Merwin has never struck me as a bully. I am however concerned that his tenure might prove as much of a whisper as Glück’s. At a time when the funding of literature and the arts is under attack in virtually every state budget, another ghost as laureate would represent a real abandonment of responsibility. I hope I’m wrong.

But imagine, if you will, what this same post might look like in the hands of Juliana Spahr, Linh Dinh, or Charles Bernstein, Bob Holman, Stacy Szymaszek, Rodrigo Toscano, Geof Huth or Camille Dungy. Or if the post was shared, say, by Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy. Or if the laureate had a name like Prageet Sharma, Mytili Jagannathan or K. Silem Mohammad. What a distance we still have to travel.

Kay Ryan has been named Poet Laureate of the United States (PLOTUS in Donald Hall’s useful acronym). And while she is being pitched as an outsider in this position, she also represents the 47^th consecutive School of Quietude poet to hold the position in its 71 year history.¹ The sole attempt at an exception ever was the 1952 invitation to William Carlos Williams, who declined due to illness & never served. Williams still gets listed, I see, in some rosters, perhaps out of embarrassment at just how one-sided this peculiar institution has been. The male-female & white-nonwhite ratios have nothing on the stranglehold grasp of this one small literary tendency. Avants & post-avants are right there with Asian- and Hispanic-Americans when it comes to celebrating the voice that is great within us. We. Just. Don’t. Exist.

Still, Ryan could be called a genuine outsider. She doesn’t teach in Amherst or Cambridge or New Haven, but at the College of Marin, a junior college just north of San Francisco. She is not included in Oxford’s Anthology of Modern American Poets – tho neither are Kooser, Simic or Hall among recent laureates. Even more telling, Ryan is not among the 110 poets included in the encyclopedic Bay Poetics anthology.

But if Ryan is a cipher to much of the poetry scene even in her own community, the reality is that she’s not a bad writer. Nor is she a typical quietist in her use of short forms & short lines. And the real test of her tenure won’t be whether or not she is worthy of the award – there are hundreds of poets, post-avant & quietist alike, with similar credentials. The test will be what she does with the position.

The task of the successful laureate presumably is to improve the conditions for poetry during his/her tenure in the office. In this regard, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Ted Kooser & Donald Hall were all successful, because they used the bully pulpit of the office to advocate for verse itself. Kooser may have also used the post to take some potshots at those who don’t confuse sentimental mawkishness for “plain speech,” but on the whole his American Life in Poetry newspaper feature, the main consequence of his term as PLOTUS, is a fair argument for what he likes, and it at least gets the idea of poetry out to audiences who might well have no other serendipitous access to the form.

By comparison, Louise Glück did a few interviews at the start of her term & otherwise disappeared into the night. Still, even a bump on a log could have made a more positive contribution to the genre than the office’s most recent occupant, the aforementioned Mr. Simic. He attacked what he didn’t like – big books, complexity, the New Americans – & let it go at that. Even the three years the post went vacant after Williams turned it down could not match Simic in diminishing its prestige & importance. The most polite thing that can be said about Simic is that he didn’t understand the position or the opportunity he had been given.

This places Ryan into an interesting situation. Expectations could hardly be lowered any further. The task before her is not simply to find new and useful ways to promote the diversity of American poetries, but to rehabilitate the office of PLOTUS itself. She can begin by presuming that she represents all of the poets & poetries of the nation, not just the same little clique that’s clung to the job since 1937.

 

¹ Stanley Kunitz held the post twice, in 1974-76 and again in 2000-2001. Glück & Rita Dove also has held the post twice, each being part of a SoQ trifecta for Y2K along with W. S. Merwin. Coming after Hass & Pinsky, that was a three-can-be-less-than-one experience.