“I have no idea, I have no idea,” said Philip Levine, the former United States poet laureate, who has lived in Fresno since the late 1950s. But his enthusiasm was tempered by worries over the proliferation of poets laureate. “If you gave the Congressional Medal of Honor to everybody who got drafted, in a way you water down the award,” he said. “Do all these towns need a poet laureate? That’s what I wonder. Does Fresno, for that matter?”

Ashley Swearengin, the city’s mayor, said Fresno realized that there was “a missing piece” in its ability to express itself. So the city decided on a poet laureate “to express what it’s like to be in Fresno, what life is like on the ground here, and to really capture the essence of our community, to bind us as a community and help to represent to the outside world what our community is like.”

Fresno, which is providing a $2,000 stipend for a two-year term, chose James Tyner, 37, an award-winning poet, a full-time librarian and the author of a chapbook of poetry, “The Ghetto Exorcist.” At his inauguration, Mr. Tyner read from a poem he had composed for the occasion, “Fresno, California. 2013,” which began:

I am Fresno.

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, waiting

for that last summer, before heading out of town.

The rapid rise in poets laureate, especially in small cities and towns, makes it difficult to know their exact numbers. But according to the Academy of American Poets, at least 35 larger cities have poets laureate.

“In the past five years, we’ve seen many, many more local communities create and fill the poet laureate position,” said Jennifer Benka, the academy’s executive director. “It really is a nationwide phenomenon.”