And you can’t just slam it from the other side.
It’s a clown suitcase: the clown flips open the suitcase and pulls out a ton of stuff. Her poems are bathed in bathos. I’m trying to make something exist that didn’t exist.”She is a master at this. Kay Ryan. They are funny both as bona fide jokes, and also in the way the language writhes upon itself, in the surprise of the knowledge gained, the embarrassment of the idea assayed, the conundrum stretched out upon a page.She is perhaps, along with James Richardson, the most surprising of contemporary poets. She did, thankfully for us, though she had to wait a long while until we learned to show our collective gratitude.Levity and patience are two central concepts in Ryan’s poetry, the latter, of course, evident in her personal life as well as her verse. Kay Ryan has been compared to Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore, sharing a delight in the quirks of logic and language. It’s funny to think about Ryan’s poems as cogent, or clarifying, but in their twisting, approximating, loosening way, they are. There is a connection, too, between Ryan’s poetic patience and the use of the long pause in standup comedy. INTERVIEWER. The use of rhyme contributes to this sense of understanding—also to their sense of levity and humor.Ryan has said, on reading a good poem: “One’s atoms are mysteriously distanced from one another. A poem is an empty suitcase that you can never quit emptying. At these moments, she doesn’t condemn herself or others, but turns her intellect into wit and laughs with us at the absurdity of such seriousness, as when she advises in one of the excellent new poems that a “bitter pill/doesn’t need/to be swallowed/to work,” but instead just “reading your name/on the bottle/does the trick,” giving us a chuckle before reminding us how “eager/to be wrecked” we often are (18).
Confronted with her own sudden leap in popularity, Ryan remained true to her ideal of the quiet life. She has explained her preference for reading poetry on the page as opposed to hearing it spoken by a third party, whether the poet herself or someone else, calling poetry readings “this out-loud business.” “I write for the page,” she says. Read all poems of Kay Ryan and infos about Kay Ryan. They’re so short that if she didn’t, the audience may miss one entirely, by glancing out the window or concentrating too hard on Ryan’s voice. Erratics are rocks left behind as a glacier recedes. Because she keeps a low profile, she has been called an ‘outsider’ poet, a term she dismisses. In fact, she’s so adventurous in this area that one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Blandeur” (158), is an examination of a made-up word, where she calls for the opposite of grandeur, to “let less happen” in the world.Yet, what is most heartening about Ms. Ryan is that she’s not an idealist and she’s unafraid to acknowledge when our humanity interferes with our ability to savor the simple. It’s this benevolence towards humanity that remains consistent throughout this collection and is its final gift, for it trains us to look at the world with the attention and scrutiny she gives every moment, every word, every gesture, and I guarantee that if you spend a few minutes each morning with these poems, you will notice at least one thing differently in your day, and that single new perception could make you see “The Best of It” in much more. That is to say, one still In a contemporary culture thrilled with noise and equivocation, popularity contests and advertisements, Ryan sails on the antithetical tack, as she has her entire career. It might also be said that she approaches her art like another Irishman, aesthetic in the way Wilde was: words for words’ sake. Grace Cavalieri: Our guest is Kay Ryan, sixteenth Poet Laureate/Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress.Kay Ryan was born in California and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. “I’m shockingly passive,” she has said. “You have to make some room for your mind.
She has done so from a quiet base in Northern California, miles away from the poetic scene, eons away from a modern temperament of shouting and noise, rapidity and clutter.
Her old term for it (though she has since professed a mild dislike) is ‘recombinant rhyme’, which refers to the clipping of genetic material in one organism and its insertion in another.