I love Kay Ryan’s poems. They’re simultaneously playful and profound. The Washington Post interviewed the U.S. Poet Laureate during last weekend’s National Book Festival. She was asked if she ever gets recognized in public now:

I do! I was at a festival recently at Yosemite, and I was standing in line to use the bathroom. This was up in the Tuolumne Meadows, and the people said, You go first! And I said, Oh I couldn’t possibly. They said, You must! There was quite a line, and I said, This is great! And then at the reading, I said: Auden said that poetry makes nothing happen, but that’s not true — I got cuts in the bathroom line.