National Poetry Month - Day 2

April 2, 2010 Today's poem is from our current national Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan.  All poems should be read aloud, and this one is no exception.  So take a sip of water and read aloud  to yourself,  your dog, your housemate, or your neighbor.  The flow of vowels and consonants in these lines makes reading them feel a little bit like mouth yoga - all of the parallel pronunciations feel lovely.  Ready, set, go!

Dew Kay Ryan As neatly as peas in their green canoe, as discreetly as beads strung in a row, sit drops of dew along a blade of grass. But unattached and subject to their weight, they slip if they accumulate. Down the green tongue out of the morning sun into the general damp, they're gone. Kay Ryan was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's degree from UCLA. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. In 2008, Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in California. Ryan has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005); Say Uncle (2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), which was a finalist for both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Strangely Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983). Ryan's awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.   About her work, J. D. McClatchy has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost." This biography has been adapted from www.poets.org. Today's poem brought to you from the front desk courtesy of April.