Word: poetes
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...American poet laureateship grew out of the English medieval tradition of granting royal patronage to poets who traveled from court to court. The first de facto laureate was Ben Jonson, who received a pension from King James I in 1616. John Dryden was the first to bear the official title of "laureate," which was bestowed on him in 1670. He received an honorarium of ?100 for writing birthday poems for the royal family. Since then, poets including William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson have held the post in England. Their only duty was to write poems for national occasions. Their...
...position existed from 1937 until 1985 under the title Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Past "consultants" include Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. In 1986, Robert Penn Warren was named the first official Poet Laureate Consultant. Although composing poems for state occasions has never been a requirement of the job, Howard Nemerov wrote a poem in 1989 to mark the 200th anniversary of the first meeting of Congress, and Rita Dove composed a poem when the Statue of Freedom was restored to the dome of the Capitol Building...
...Although she is being touted as an outsider in comparison to more high-profile choices of the past, such as W.S. Merwin and Robert Pinsky, she is in fact a well-established poet. It took 10 years for her to get her poems published in "good literary magazines," she recalls, but she has since won nearly every prestigious poetry award, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which carries a $100,000 purse, both in 2004. She has kept herself at a remove from the poetry community and has happily taught remedial English at the College...
...Ryan will wield her bite remains to be seen. Each poet laureate can establish programs of his or her own choosing. Joseph Brodsky, laureate from 1991 to 1992, worked to make books of poetry available in supermarkets, airports and hotel rooms. Robert Pinsky used his three-year tenure to start the Favorite Poem Project, in which Americans read and comment on their favorite poems. Billy Collins initiated Poetry 180, a poem a day to be read in American high schools...
...Although Ryan hasn't decided what her project will be, she agrees with those who feel that poetry's "uselessness" is precisely what makes it cool. As Matthew Zapruder, a poet and an editor at Wave Press, observes, "The idea that you write poetry your whole life and then suddenly in a very public way have to start thinking about how to make it 'useful' for the nation is pretty terrifying. In a culture like ours, where language has been completely and utterly subordinated to the task of selling people things, how do you create a little freedom? Only...