Highest Honors for Kay Ryan
California Poet Appointed Library of Congress 16th Poet Laureate
Jul 24, 2008
The American Poet Archibald Mac Leish (1892–1982) once said: "A poem should not mean, but be". Kay Ryan's simple, yet complex poems fit this description. Her poetry is highly regarded for its unusual perspectives, wit and word play. She takes a common, everyday object or a notion and looks at it from a different angle. David Yezzi commented: "Ryan's poems leave the reader elevated or changed or moved but at a loss to say exactly how this effect has been wrought. It's like arm wrestling with the scrawny kid in the schoolyard who pins you before you know what's happened."
Here is a poem about silence from The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005):
Shark's Teeth
Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's- tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.
Whole worlds are contained in some of the little vignettes that Ryan coins. It does take time to look at a poem and take it in, it does take time to reread it and maybe even read it out loud. Reading poetry written wth such technical precision is almost a counter-cultural endeavor in a time of multi-tasking and rushing from one project to the next.
Staying Home and Doing the Writing
Ms. Ryan acknowledges that she has carved out a simple life for herself conducive to writing poetry: "I have tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy." The simpler her routine, she explains, the more complex her thinking can be. She taught remedial English for the past 33 years at College of Marin in Kentfield (CA) where she lives with her longtime partner, Carol Adair. Asked, if she thinks her new position as Poet Laureate will make it easier or harder to write, she says: "No, uh-uh. I think it will make it impossible."
High Recognition Comes Late
Not surprisingly, it took a long time for Ryan's work to find public recognition. After her first two books were barely noticed, she won a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship and the $100.000 Ruth Lilly Prize in 2004. Since then she has become a role model for unconventional writers. Her poems have appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. She has published six collections of poetry.
She Does Not Write in the First Person
Unlike many other authors, she rarely writes in the first person. She has said, "I don’t use ‘I’ because the personal is too hot and sticky for me to work with. I like the cooling properties of the impersonal." In her poem "Hide and Seek," she describes the feelings of the person hiding without using a personal pronoun until the very last line:
Hide and Seek
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It’s
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It’s
like some form
of skin’s developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.
"I like to think of all good poetry as providing more oxygen into the atmosphere; it just makes it easier to breathe," Kay Ryan has said. Among her favorite writers are Philip Larkin and Robert Frost. It is an honor for her, that she will be following in the footsteps of Robert Frost (1874-1963), who was Poet Laureate in 1958.
PBS NewsHour Poetry Series: Kay Ryan reads from her collection "The Niagara River."
Online Web Guide on Kay Ryan (Library of Congress)
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