Two points:

1) Derb may relax. Unlike the British poet laureate, who serves (as I recall) for life, or at the pleasure of the Crown, or for some other long and indeterminate term, the American poet laureate serves for only eight months. By next spring, Kooser will be gone.

2) From a reader:

“Mr. Derbyshire writes that he expects the poet laureate of the United States to be in the tradition of ‘Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Longfellow, Tennyson, and Kipling.’

Oh really? Save for Longfellow, all of his poets are Englishmen.

How about a laureate in the tradition of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell or Robert Frost, just to name a few ‘Muricans!”