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In the meantime, she taught remedial English at a community college in Marin County, California, and lived quietly with her longtime spouse, Carol Adair, who died in January 2009. Unlike many poets of her stature, Ryan was not interested in the busy academic swirl of conferences and university life.

An outsider longing for peace

Although Ryan serves as a chancellor the Academy of American Poets, when pressed, she places herself in the "outsider" tradition of American poetry.

With characteristic wry humor, Ryan acknowledges that some of her poems are essentially "complaints."

"What I am repeatedly asking for is less," she says. "Please make the world quieter, [and] take away some of this sensation."

She feels she is "overly visited" by the ideas of others and the "general onslaught" of the world.

"... And I'd like peace from it most of the time," she explains.

Ryan offers her poem "Crustacean Island" as an example of the kind of peace she sometimes seeks:

There could be an island paradise

where crustaceans prevail.

Click, click, go the lobsters

with their china mitts and

articulated tails.

It would not be sad like whales

with their immense and patient sieving

and the sobering modesty

of their general way of living.

It would be an island blessed

with only cold-blooded residents

and no human angle.

It would echo with a thousand castanets

and no flamencos.

Poetry cares for itself, Ryan says

Ryan nearly turned down the offer to become U.S. poet laureate. She says she wanted to protect her privacy and keep writing without being distracted by the job's many public duties. Ultimately, Ryan accepted the post at her partner's urging. But she says hasn't used her highly visible role to "advocate" for poetry.

"I think poetry is indestructible, and I don't worry about it, and I don't think it needs the protection of me or the advocacy of me or anyone."

Ryan likens poetry to gold coins: "You can lose it in the couch, or in the ground, or anywhere and when it's dug up its going to be valuable, so that real poetry utterly protects itself, [and] takes care of itself."

Poet laureate advocates for education, careful attention to words

Having said that, she does have a couple of projects she is committed to as the poet laureate. She is a powerful advocate for community colleges, which she believes often offer an excellent education, but are generally underappreciated.

Ryan also says she'd like to make a little bit more "space" in between words.

"I think all words should have a fraction more time if they are spoken, or, [if] on the page, I think we should have a little more white space between words."

It was perhaps in that spirit that Ryan wrote a short little poem called "Dew":

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.