the rix mix

After 341 Years, a Woman Is British Poet Laureate

LONDON - Carol Ann Duffy was named poet laureate of Britain on Friday, the first time in its 341-year history that the post - held by such poets as Dryden, Tennyson, Wordsworth and Ted Hughes - has gone to a woman.

Ms. Duffy, 53, is known for writing accessible, often witty poems on a wide range of topics, many of them to do with the minutiae of everyday life. She succeeds Andrew Motion, who has just completed his 10-year term.

She's also a Scot, a lesbian, & was raised Roman Catholic, all of which might have had her burned at the stake or beheaded in the past. True, the job ain't what it used to be. Motion wrote eight royal poems & earned 700 bottles of sherry in ten years. Wordsworth had turned tediously reactionary by the time he was appointed, & no one pays much attention to Tennyson anymore. But it's as large a change as making an Italian-American Archbishop of New York - which hasn't happened yet.

(Laureate Ben Jonson received annually the terse, about nine gallons)