First Woman Chosen as U.S. Poet Laureate

Mona Van Duyn, a poet from St. Louis who has won most of the nation’s top literary awards, was named by the Library of Congress on Sunday as the nation’s first female poet laureate.

But she says she is going to bury that weighty but lustrous title in the back of her mind “because it makes me feel top heavy.”

She said she will instead emphasize the position’s older and more prosaic title, “consultant in poetry” at the Library of Congress.

“I think people are very confused about what a poet laureate is,” she said in an interview, making clear that she has no intention of following in the British tradition of that title by producing poetic paeans to the nation’s leaders and achievements.

Van Duyn, 71, said she was “terribly pleased and terribly flattered” to be offered the position. But she made clear that she believes it was time that a woman was given the distinction.

Van Duyn has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant and the $25,000 Ruth Lilly Award and other honors.

She said there is “an enormous audience for poetry in America.” The problem is that most fans don’t buy their poetry in books.

“They come to poetry readings by the hundreds and the thousands and watch the poet’s lips move and the words come out,” she said.

“Perhaps it’s the influence of television,” she said. “They’re used to seeing it and hearing it. They’re just not used to sitting by themselves and reading it.”