The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named 22 new MacArthur fellows on Tuesday. They'll receive Genius awards, which come with a no-strings attached grant of $500,000 over five years.

The diverse grantees include a journalist, cellist, clinical psychologist, computer scientist and a former poet laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan, who also received a Pulitzer Prize this year. Ryan is well-known for her compact, vivid and accessible verse.

The high honors that Kay Ryan has received have come as a bit of a surprise to the poet herself, who is raised which she calls the "glamor-free, ocean-free, hot, stinky, oil-rich, potato-rich" San Joaquin Valley of California.

"I have to say that I didn't want to be a poet and I still feel pretty embarrassed about it in a lot of situations because it seemed like putting on airs". "But I found that poetry was nonetheless possessing my mind. Like, if I read a book and it was prose, the prose would start rhyming, and it was kind of a little insanity taking me over."

Ryan's poems often explore every day human emotions such as hope, doubt and fear. She has a fluid, soaring imagination, as we see in the poem,"Killing Time."

Time is rubbery.

If you hide it

in the shrubbery

it will wait

will winter and

wash back out

with the rainwater.

You will find it

on your steps again

like the newspaper.

Time compresses.

Stuff it in the

couch corner and

it will spring out

some night or other

when you have guests.

One of whom guesses.

Time stretches.

Then it snaps back

leaving bare patches

that didn't happen.

Abandoned time hardens

like hidden gun.

People feel around.

Sooner or later

it will be found.

Today Ryan has published seven collections of poetry, beginning with a self-published volume in 1983. But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that she began to acquire a national reputation. 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, Kay Ryan has never been interested in the busy academic swirl of conferences and university life, or even in the high visibility her poetlaureate post, her Pulitzer Prize and now, her MacArthur Genius grant have given her.

She says she is already "overly visited by the sensation and the ideas of others" and "would like peace from it most of the time."

laureate: Worthy of the greatest honor or distinction 戴桂冠的；榮譽的

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（來源：VOA 編輯：張若瓊）