Up before her husband and kids, Caroline Goodwin grabs a blanket and three books of poems and goes out to her dirt-and-concrete backyard to read for one uninterrupted hour.
Then, after all the interrupters have left for work or school, she moves to her desk between the washer-dryer and the water heater, and spends the day trying to write a poem as good as the ones she has just read.
The house is cold, but the heat is on Goodwin, 49, who has just been named the first poet laureate of San Mateo County. When her two-year term begins Jan. 1, she will be expected to deliver product: a new poem to be read before a meeting of the Board of Supervisors at the beginning of each quarter.
"Oh, yeah, nervous, are you kidding?" she says, while taking a mid-morning break at the kitchen table of her rental house in the coastal community of Montara. "Number one, I'm very slow. I've been writing poems for 20 years and have one book. I've never had to write a poem for someone, about something before."
Elected officials everywhere now seem to want poems written for them and about their county or city, hence the proliferation of poets laureate - a centuries-old tradition first bestowed with a "butt of sack," a Welsh term for a barrel of sherry, 600 bottles worth, according to Goodwin, who has researched the rewards.
There are county poets laureate in San Francisco, Sonoma, Napa, Marin and Santa Clara. The cities of Los Gatos, Cupertino, Pacifica and East Palo Alto have them. Perhaps the most notorious of the bunch is James Tyner, who earned himself a feature in the New York Times for his unsentimental approach to the job of poet laureate for the city of Fresno.
"I am Fresno," he recited in his inaugural address. "I am the high school kid that can't wait to get out of this town, there's nothing to do here, nothing ever happens ..." and so on.
Goodwin's approach won't be like this. "Every day I am grateful," she says. Plus, there is way more to do in Montara - even with a Main Street with not much on it - than in her former home of Little Port Walter, Alaska. Its year-round population was 5, counting Goodwin, her husband and daughter, though it seemed larger, "because of the population of voices inside your head," she says.
Those voices, plus winter days where it never got brighter than twilight, gave rise to a style of poetry that Goodwin describes as "nature poetry, which always sounds a little dismissive. I like to think of it as a little more complicated than that. Like what are we? What is our place in the universe?"
Sitting in the daytime darkness of Little Port Walter, she worked up a portfolio to submit for a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, at Stanford University, in 1999. She was accepted for the two-year free ride, and "that was my ticket out of Alaska," she says.
The book that took her 20 years, "Trapline," contains 24 poems, ranging from six lines to 10 pages. Most are rooted in her hometown of Anchorage, which she is proud to note has been listed as one of the 10 worst places in America to live.
Poets always have interesting day jobs, so Goodwin has done time as a forklift driver in a pulp mill and put in seven seasons in cold storage at a fish packing plant.
These experiences have bled into her writing, and so have the years spent living in East Palo Alto, while at Stanford. One poem, called "Weeding," is about these mesmerizing bugs she saw come out of the ground then take wing and fly in her yard near the bayfront.
"I didn't know they were termites," she says.
East Palo Alto is in San Mateo County, but termite poetry was apparently fine with the selection committee. Goodwin was picked from among 15 nominees and five finalists.
"Caroline Goodwin has the heart and soul and passion to spread the power of poetry to the people of San Mateo County," said Supervisor Warren Slocum, who co-chaired the committee.
Goodwin did not get her butt of sack, and she hasn't been given an honorarium, either. Nobody has mentioned gas money. She has two daughters, Naomi and Izzy. Her husband, Nick, is a plumber, and she scratches out a living teaching night classes at Stanford and day classes at California College of the Arts, in San Francisco and Oakland.
Last year, CCA sent her to a poetry jamboree in Wales, a necessary pilgrimage for any coastal poet. She came back with renewed appreciation for Dylan Thomas and the Welsh-like landscape of Montara.
When she was announced as the winner in October, it took Montara Fog blogger Darin Boville by surprise, at his desk in the house next door. "He had no idea I was over here writing poems," Goodwin says, "and I had no idea he was over there doing a news blog about Montara."
It was confirmed by Facebook. The blogger didn't even have to yell over the fence to break the story about the first poet laureate of San Mateo County.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitingsf
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