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Katharine Coles, a University of Utah professor of English whose inquisitive poems explore unexpected relationships between art and science, and between the foreign and the familiar, is Utah's new poet laureate.

Coles, 47, will serve for five years. She becomes Utah's third poet laureate, succeeding Ken Brewer, who died of cancer in March, and David Lee, who served from 1997 to 2002.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. appointed Coles on Friday in a brief ceremony at the state Capitol while praising poetry's ability "to open the eyes and to open minds." The job carries no official duties, although poet laureates are expected to help expose Utahns to literature through public readings, workshops and other projects around the state. After being introduced by Huntsman, Coles read one of her poems, "Numbers," which celebrates beauty in mathematical equations.

Coles is married to Chris Johnson, a U. professor of computer science, who attended Friday's ceremony. She has credited her husband's scientific work as an influence on her poetry.

Asked about her goals, Coles said she learned from her predecessors, Lee and Brewer, that "the job of the poet laureate is to bring the poetry of Utah to the people of Utah."

Coles said she hopes to establish a program by which poems by Utahns would appear at least weekly in newspapers, on radio and in other media outlets around the state. She also favors installing poems at TRAX light-rail stations.

"I want poetry to become an integral part of Utahns' daily lives," Coles said. "I think it's really important to the health of the republic."

In her public appearances, Coles said, she will present poems as graceful and meaningful language, not as puzzles that can only be solved by the cultural elite.

In this way, she hopes to make poetry more accessible to people who aren't often exposed to it.

Coles plans to meet soon with members of the Utah Arts Council, which oversees the state's poet laureate program, to discuss goals and funding for her new post.

Historically, the state has budgeted little money for the poet laureate program - something Huntsman said he hopes to remedy.

"It needs to be supplemented with the funds to do this the right way," he said Friday. "This is an area that I take seriously."

Coles is the author of three collections of poems and two novels. Her fourth collection of poems, Fault, will be published by Red Hen Press in 2008. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Utah, where she has directed the creative writing program. She also founded and directs the university's annual Utah Symposium in Science and Literature.

Coles, a Utah native, has taught at the U. since 1997. Before that she was an assistant professor of English at Westminster College, where she ran an annual poetry series that brought such esteemed poets as Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky and Czeslaw Milosz to Salt Lake City.

Through her work at Westminster and at the U., Coles is well connected in the world of poetry.

After her appointment Friday, she introduced Hass, a former U.S. poet laureate, at a brown bag lunch at the downtown library.

Coles earned an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Washington, a master's in literature from the University of Houston and a doctorate in English literature and creative writing from the U.

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* Contact BRANDON GRIGGS at 801-257-8689 or griggs@sltrib.com.

Numbers, by Katharine Coles

They won't stick. They gleam like brilliantine.

Perfect parsers, they jostle into essence

Then reappear, renewed. A trillion seems

Just so many zeroes. Xed-out, they dance,

Uncoupling and recoupling along a line

Hoofing infinite movement, can-can's limber

Leg and best foot forward, tapping time

Until time is up and they're dismembered,

Dead-broke as syntax, clauses so declined

They tick themselves off. It's only beauty-

Perfect measures measuring the mind-

Mind tries to get around. Pen, brush, or flute. The

Equation tooled to figure life. Amount

Imagination multiplies. Takes to account.