ArtsBeat: On reading new US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan

"Great thoughts / do not nourish / small thoughts / as parents do children," observes poet Kay Ryan in the terse, almost aphoristic style for which she is noted. "Like the eucalyptus, / they make the soil / beneath them barren," she writes. "Standing in a / grove of them / is hideous."

If a single 10 line poem can open a window on an entire body of work, then this succinct selection from the California native's collection Say Uncle (Grove Press, 2000) encapsulates much of what makes Ryan such a resolutely contrarian voice in American poetry and an intriguing choice to succeed Charles Simic as the 16th Poet Laureate of the United States.

Most of the media coverage of Ryan's appointment last week focused on her eccentricities: the implied paradox of the well published but not widely known poet--a self-described "hermit" who eschews writer's conferences and the quid pro quo networking of the creative writing industry (see her irreverent essay "I Go to AWP") in favor of cross-country bicycling and teaching remedial writing at a community college just north of San Francisco--being summoned to serve in the high profile role of "poetry consultant to the Librarian of Congress" and therefore, in our system of representative democracy, suddenly accountable to the entire American people.

Such consideration as remained for her work tended toward comparisons of her compressed, elliptical style, subtle wit, and unusual rhyme schemes to that of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and one relatively contemporary voice, the Iowa born Quaker turned New York City Audubon Society librarian Amy Clampitt (1920-1994), who like Ryan began the publishing phase of her career at mid-life. Ryan's supporters, who range from New Formalists like Dana Gioia--the poet who is currently Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts--to mainstream academic poets like Yale based JD McClatchy acknowledge but are inclined to underplay the subversive qualities of her work.

Ryan's poems situate themselves not so much in opposition to what Charles Bernstein refers to as America's "official verse culture" as in aversion from it. In her poem "Repulsive Theory" (perhaps the closest her concision permits to an Ars Poetica), she notes:

Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?

What begins as a modest observation of a principle in nature quickly shifts to an existential statement of resistance--"interiority," if you will--as she continues:

And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it's got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending-off—
extending far beyond the personal,
I'm convinced—
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other...

The comparisons to Dickinson may be apt, but it's the radical formalist of Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, not the cloistered spinster of The Belle of Amherst that she echoes in "Full Measure":

People whose gift will not break
live by it all their lives; it shadows
every empty act they undertake.

Iconoclastic by nature, she is no more likely to identify as an avant-gardist than a traditionalist, but Ryan's work evokes both the cryptic moral clarity of the Delphic Oracle and the decontextualized self-reflexiveness of conceptual artist Jenny Holzer's "Truisms"--those LED billboard scripts that started appearing as public art installations in the 1980s. "I try to squeeze things until they explode," Ryan told one recent interviewer.

The plasticity of surfaces is another conceptualist theme of her work. "Surfaces serve/ their own purposes," she writes in her collection Elephant Rocks, "strive to remain/constant...There is/ a skin, not just on/ peaches but on oceans." She proceeds to elaborate on the skins of cats and glass, on the porous surfaces of reefs. "The private lives of surfaces/ are innocent, not devious," she writes:

Take the one-dimensional
belief of enamel in itself,
the furious autonomy
of luster (crush a pearl—
it’s powder), the whole
curious seamlessness
of how we’re each surrounded
and what it doesn’t teach.

In the title poem of her most recent collection The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005), Ryan speaks to the breach between our perceptions and our knowledge of the river without ever alluding specifically to the impending Falls. This is a poem that trusts the reader to know there is a rough ride ahead:

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

To read more of Ryan's poems and essays, visit Poetry Foundation: Kay Ryan Archive . To listen to an hour long radio conversation with Ryan, visit WBUR & NPR's On Point : Poet Kay Ryan.

--R.D. Pohl

Comments

I thank R.D. Pohl for introducing me to Kay Ryan and her cohesive thoughts.

I am also thankful that Ms. Ryan writes more clearly than R.D. Pohl, i.e., "Ryan's work evokes both the cryptic moral clarity of the Delphic Oracle and the decontextualized self-reflexiveness of conceptual artist Jenny Holzer's "Truisms".

Mr.(Ms.?) Pohl. I have no idea what you are saying. But it sounds really great, like something I would like to be able to say (and may sometime.)

Posted by: Mary of the Lofti | July 25, 2008 at 05:31 PM

To clarify my point in that sentence: Ryan's poems, while rooted in the senses, often seem addressed to us from a formal remove. Who is it that is speaking to us in these poems? Is this a "timeless" voice? An ironic echo of a "timeless" voice? Ryan keeps us guessing...

Posted by: RD Pohl | July 26, 2008 at 06:20 PM