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Although not exactly a "music" story, the appointment today of 46 year-old, Natasha Trethewey as the next U.S. Poet Laureate, is a big deal. And since poetry is closely linked to musical rhythm and intonation, it's worthy of a mention:

Ms. Trethewey, 46, was born in Gulfport, Miss., and is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993.

Unlike the recent laureates W. S. Merwin and her immediate predecessor, Philip Levine, both in their 80s when appointed, Ms. Trethewey, who will officially take up her duties in September, is still in midcareer and not well-known outside poetry circles. Her work combines free verse with more traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle to explore memory and the racial legacy of America.

A former chairman of the NEA comments:

"The appointment of Natasha Trethewey is a very welcome event," said Dana Gioia, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and an early admirer of her work. "She writes out of the complicated history of the region, and even from her own complicated history." In a phone interview explaining his choice James Billington, the librarian of Congress, said: "We're not necessarily on some kick to find a younger poet. The more I read of it, American poetry seems extremely rich in diversity, talent and freedom of expression, and she has a voice that is already original and accomplished. I have an affinity for American individuals who are absolutely unique, and I think that this is one."

Indeed, much of her story is what makes her poetry so special:

As one of her poems explains, Ms. Trethewey is the product of a union that was still a crime in Mississippi when her parents married: her mother was black and her father was white. Years later, after her mother's death, she came across her own birth certificate and saw that the line for the race of her mother says, "colored," the race of her father, "Canadian."

"That's how language works -- how we change and rewrite ourselves," she said.

When Ms. Trethewey was 19 and in college, her mother was murdered by her second husband, an abusive man she had divorced, and the effort of trying to recover her mother's memory is one of Ms. Trethewey's other major themes. "But in dreams you live," she writes in "Native Guard," "so I try taking, not to let go. You'll be dead again tomorrow."

Recalling her mother's death, she said, "Strangely enough, that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened and started writing what I knew even then were really bad poems. It took me nearly 20 years to find the right language, to write poems that were successful enough to explain my own feelings to me and that might also be meaningful to others."

The profile goes on:

Ms. Trethewey's great theme is memory, and in particular the way private recollection and public history sometimes intersect but more often diverge. "The ghost of history lies down beside me," she writes in one of her poems, "rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm."

She has devoted much of her career to resurrecting or recreating the histories of people who don't often make it into poetry books. Her first volume, "Domestic Work" (2000), is about just what the title says: black maids, washerwomen, factory workers. One of the poems begins:

"The eyes of eight women

I don't know

stare out of this photograph

saying remember."

Good for the NEA to choose this woman. Young and vibrant with much to say, it should help spread the magic of this art form to all 50 states.

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