number dating only from the last two decades or so.
The craze isn’t just happening at the state level. Boston and Los Angeles, among other cities, have established posts in recent years, while a Google search for “county poet laureate” yields thousands of hits.
“I’ve been to places where there is a poet laureate for every ZIP code,” Billy Collins, a former United States and New York State laureate, said. “The country is crawling with them. I think it’s out of control.”
The national laureate position, which carries a $35,000 annual stipend, dates to 1937. The honoree is chosen by the Librarian of Congress solely on the basis of “poetic merit,” and has no responsibilities beyond the informal expectation that the poet speak at events opening and closing the library’s literary season.
Rob Casper, the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress, traces the broader laureate boom to the rise in the early 1990s of so-called activist national laureates like Joseph Brodsky, who sought to have poetry books placed in every hotel room in America, and Rita Dove, who brought Crow Indian schoolchildren, young poets from Washington and dozens of others to read their work at the Library of Congress.
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