The house of American poetry has many rooms and we can get a guided tour during National Poetry Month when publishers release new collections and poets take to the podium to read their work in public.

News that the Cleveland Public Library was bringing in Poet Laureate Consultant to Congress Kay Ryan to read last Sunday called for a road trip to that metropolis on Lake Erie. (More on that necessity later.) Ms. Ryan was an outside choice for the largely ceremonial post sponsored by the Library of Congress two years ago and was reappointed this year, so I was curious about her and her work.

Her predecessors, such as Robert Pinsky, Rita Dove, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Billy Collins and the late Stanley Kunitz were better known, with ties to the Associated Writing Program culture of academic poets and an appetite for public performance, particularly Mr. Pinsky.

Ms. Ryan, 64, spent 30 years teaching remedial English at a community college in Marin County, Calif., and almost as many years working to get her poems published. She never attended a creative writing class and seems happy about it.

Despite the odd sense of emptiness to downtown Cleveland on a Sunday afternoon -- it reminded me of Chicago without people -- there were about 100 in the starkly modern auditorium of the Louis Stokes Wing on Superior Avenue.

And, while many here have been gnashing teeth over reductions in hours at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to save money, Cleveland's main library is closed Sundays for the same reason.

"Worse (state) cuts are on the way" for the library said Thomas Corrigan, president of the library board of trustees, before introducing Ms. Ryan, so Pittsburghers are in better shape, this year at least.

The poet laureate, dressed simply in slacks, a short jacket and light blouse, was a revelation to somebody accustomed to the usually eager-to-please, sing-song declamation style of contemporary bards.

She's no-nonsense in her approach, going straight to the work, dispensing with the regular pleasantries. She did pledge to read "poems that are a bit more challenging than I usually read," ordered us to refrain from applauding after every poem and confessed that she almost avoided becoming a poet during that era of "confessional poetry" of the 1960s.

"There was just too much bodily fluid being sprayed around for my taste," Ms. Ryan joked.

Using her new book, "The Best of It: New and Selected Poems" (Grove Press, $24) -- it's her eighth -- the poet laureate selected a series of intellectually centered poems in her characteristic compact style. Ms. Ryan is the poet of the possible, who keeps to the edges of words and thoughts, leaving emotions for others to find.

Here's a small sample from "How a Thought Thinks:"

A thought lives

underground, not

wholly mole-ish

but with some

of the same

disinterests.

"Since I don't have many poems, it's important that I read them twice," she said, and that repetition suited her platform style, drawn from her teaching experience.

But, it was all fun, thanks to Ms. Ryan's wry honesty.

"Maybe we have a world of crap poetry right now," she ventured, "that doesn't get to a lot of us. But, there is a lot of exhilarating work out there, too."

While Ms. Ryan's poetry isn't exactly exhilarating, it's singular, playful as well as serious, forcing us to prick up our ears and listen.

"Poetry isn't for everybody," says the poet laureate. "Poetry is the aristocracy of the mind."

Unlike a handful of previous poets laureate, Kay Ryan has never been to Pittsburgh, perhaps because there's no longer the International Poetry Forum to invite her. It's another example of how its disappearance affects the city's cultural life.

However, its founder, Samuel Hazo will be recognized Monday at the Western Pennsylvania Symposium on World Literatures at Duquesne University with the program "The Voice in the Poem: Samuel J. Hazo."

The 4 p.m. event will be in the Power Center Ballroom on the Uptown campus. Cost is $30. Call 412-396-6415 to attend.