Over the weekend, I finally got a chance to start watching The Poet’s View, a DVD of five short films by documentarian Mel Stuart, and I jumped right in with the most recent one in the collection, which profiles Kay Ryan, the new U.S. Poet Laureate. It’s an engaging portrait, interspersing a conversation with Ryan about her life and her publishing career with footage from two poetry readings. I actually found it a bit more welcoming than the other two films on the disc that I’ve watched so far—it’s not that W.S. Merwin and John Ashbery aren’t interesting subjects, but the outside narrators (Anjelica Huston and Suzanne Pleshette, respectively) used in those two films to fill in the biographical and historical backgrounds felt distracting after the intimacy of Ryan’s portrait. I’m still looking forward to sitting down with the final two films, on Louise Glück and Anthony Hecht, and I’m hoping the Academy of American Poets can keep the series going and spotlight some of the subsequent generations of great American poets.