British poets laureate are expected to sing for their supper, but their American cousins can spend all day sleeping in their lovely Library of Congress office and still collect a check.

Nobody can make them do much of anything, as Louise Glueck proved when she was appointed in 2003 and did nothing in her eight-month term.

In the Anglo-Saxon bardic tradition, the laureates of the Scepter'd Isle serve for life and are required to write verses for various occasions. Alfred Lord Tennyson, for one, produced "The Charge of the Light Brigade" to mark that unpleasantness in the Crimea.

John Masefield carried on during World War II, scribbling verses for wartime. The current laureate, Andrew Motion, wrote a brief, pungent anti-war poem after his country joined the United States' invasion of Iraq.

The Library of Congress created the American laureate position in 1937, calling it the "consultant in poetry." Robert Penn Warren became the first "poet laureate consultant" in his second stint in 1986.

The only official duty of the laureate, who is appointed by the librarian of Congress, is to deliver remarks at the opening of the library's poetry reading season in October. The $35,000 stipend is intended as support for the laureate's own writing.

Kay Ryan got the national poet's job last week, replacing Charles Simic. When I sought an interview, she refused, claiming she was "inundated" with attention since the announcement, thus making her, I guess, the first Noah of poets laureate.

That position also makes it tough to learn her immediate plans and hopes for the job, forcing me to fall back on her writings to form an impression.

First soundings of Ryan's character are not encouraging, at least in the public role of the poet laureate of the United States.

"The only way I've ever gotten along in this world is by staying away from it," she wrote in a piece of journalism in 2005 for Poetry, the journal of the Poetry Foundation. "I have only enough character to keep myself out of situations that require character."

Would one of those situations be the poet laureate? After all, the job is billed as "the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans," says the Library of Congress. "The Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry."

Says Ryan: "It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all kinds. ... I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self taught."

The appreciation of poetry, for Ryan, is a private matter. National consciousness? Better for her a national unconsciousness.

"No networking, no friends in high places, no internships. I think that's how poems finally have to live, alone, without your help, so they should get used to it."

But, can we believe Ryan didn't have "friends in high places" like Dana Gioia, head of the National Endowment for the Arts, or participated in a little "networking" before getting her appointment? The government doesn't pluck some unknown out of Palookaville and stick her in a high-profile position on merit alone.

It should be a curious time for the poet laureate -- if Ryan ever comes out of her office, let alone make to Washington, D.C.