Poet Laureate Kay Ryan (part 2)

Posted by Jack on 08.01.2008 at 10:25 am

[This post is continued from yesterday]

If we’re going to assess Kay Ryan, we’re going to need to delve deeper than her experience, we’re going to need to, as my former “Modern American Playwrights” teacher would say, “please use the words, Mr. Hanlon, not the ones in your head but from the page.  Or at least try a mixture of the two.”

Before we do that however, it’s important to note some things.  First of all, Ryan has an decidedly alternative background from your average Poet Laureate.  She’s a left coaster who opts to teach at a small community college north of San Francisco.  Next to note is her engagement in the community could not be less like Pinsky or Collins (with his Poetry 180 project to bring poetry into high schools), from her own speech:

I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers conferences. It’s been a point of honor: the whole cooperative workshopping thing, not for me. I have never taken a creative writing class, I have never taught a creative writing class, and I have never gone, and will never go, to anything like [The Association of Writers and Writers Programs], I have often said.

Once, when I was about twenty-five and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability, I did try to go to a writers conference. Thirty minutes into the keynote address I had a migraine. It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side. It took her years to do a pocketful. You just know she doesn’t go to art conferences. Certainly not zillion-strong international ones, giant wheeling circuses of panel discussions.

It is interesting then, that she has been handed the mandate of “promoting poetry” (in the vague sense) as Ryan has been more low-profile loner than academic and promoter and in her hermitage, more Solipsist than Ascetic.  How will this mesh with the “office” of PL and will it force Ryan to step outside her comfort zone?

For that matter, when one relies on a

writing process [described] as “a self-imposed emergency,” the artistic equivalent of finding a loved one pinned under a 3,000-pound car. These “emergencies,” she says, allow her to tap into abilities she wouldn’t normally have, much like a father who single-handedly lifts a vehicle off his child. (from here)

one can’t help but wonder the frenzy inspired by writing for assorted State events.  If a normal writing in Northern California is lifting a 3,000 pound car then a gathering of the most powerful men and women in the world must then be a Superman like feat.  One can only hope that adrenaline doesn’t eschew technique for ideas of talent.

Ryan’s no slouch, though, that can’t be denied.  Winning the Ruth Lilly Prize in 2004 netted her $100,000 and being picked from obscurity like a hopeful on American Idol, and this time with no Simon (nor drunk Paula Abdul) to stop her from ascending to the most prestigious position around in her profession.

Her writing at first glance is a study in William Carlos Williams (a previous Laureate himself) in its shape and dependence on white space on the page, but her own frenzy disallows her from the poignant conciseness of his work.  Instead, she maintains a degree of precision and opens the doors for further commentary, not just painting a scene, but shading in it’s emotional landscape.

The aesthetic quality of Williams never seemed overdone, and rather it seemed a necessary element, whereas Ryan’s can become tired.  There are only so many times I am willing to accept the need to put every single line
in a three
or perhaps then a
four line phrase,
and her work is
rife with it.

I was ready to maintain my frosty front against Ryan, I was ready to scoff at her approach and wait to either by wowed or to make myself motion sick from constant eye-rolling, luckily, the wow came first:

“Repulsive Theory”

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?
And do these cutout coasts
and in-curved 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 …

Undeniably carrying her own sense of solitude, or repulsion from groups (or you name it), “the tone is both ironic and sincere; it is the case, I think, that repulsion is genuinely seen as a virtue, but there is a loss that the speaker skates over—namely, the loss of true intimacy, of the possibility of sustaining a genuine “private life” while also not withdrawing from the clamor and love and pain of the world around you.” (Slate)

In an America that lives with the reality of terrorist attacks, ongoing war with no end in sight and rising costs with a drooping dollar, one wonders if the withdrawl is more appropriate for citizen than Laureate but tiny emergencies won’t be hard to conjure.

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