Interesting, Barry, I heard her on Charlie Rose & was just as
uninterested as you seem to be. There was nothing in the poems she red
that excited me, although she certainly seemed to be a 'nice' person.
Haven't a few of them been okay, though? I seem to remember... way
back before the Bush years, admittedly....
Doug
On 1-May-09, at 4:45 PM, Barry Alpert wrote:
> Yes, that's apparently the case in the UK, but in the US the change
> in terminology from
> "consultant in poetry" to "poet laureate" can be largely attributed
> to the dominant cultural
> anglophilia in Washington DC. Laura Bush may have some input on the
> choice from 2000-
> 2008, but Dana Gioia and previous poet laureates put together lists
> of 15 poets from
> which the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, made the final
> choice. I'd say that
> George Bush's "sacred bard" was Dana Gioia.
>
> Kay Ryan, whose tour of duty ends May 7 with a reading at the
> Library of Congress, was
> publicly introduced by Gioia at Laura Bush's National Book
> Festival. I listened to her read
> for a while without interest until it was time to witness a film by
> the major Portuguese
> director Manoel de Oliveira. None of the readings she organized at
> the LC intrigued me in
> the least. Hard to guess who might be the next poet laureate,
> though I can imagine
> Elizabeth Alexander's name being one of the 15 listed for the
> 2009-2010 season.
>
> Barry Alper
Douglas Barbour
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