I like Kay Ryan’s poems, some of them very much indeed. I also like her prose. In a field awash in positivity, she is sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, and bracingly irreverent. I wish every aspiring poet would spend some time with her 2020 book of essays, Synthesizing Gravity.
Here she is, attending a session on “neglected poets” at an AWP conference: “I guess I shouldn’t have expected to like neglected poets since I don’t like many unneglected ones even.” She dares to be bored at a reading by W. S. Merwin. She is acerbic about the workshop world, speaking of “the great creative writing fungus.” When a young colleague gushes over a piece she wrote about becoming a poet, Ryan laments: “What in the world was my essay doing encouraging these ever-expanding fuzzy rings of literary mediocrity, deepening the dismal soup of helpful supportive writing environments?”
Well. Is there no such thing as a tough-minded and genuinely helpful writing circle? But Ryan has a more exalted group in mind.
She challenges us to orient ourselves, not by what contemporaries are doing and praising, but by the best that has been done. “I don’t want to be connected to poetry in an easy, fellowshipping way, but I do want to be connected in a way that will earn me the respect of the dead.” Again: “There, I’ve said it. I want the great masters to enjoy what I write. The noble dead are my readers, and if what I write might jostle them a little, if there were a tiny bit of scooting and shifting along the benches, this would be my thrill.”
Ambition! We need more of it.
I enjoy Ryan’s writings least where she grows more tolerant. I question her belief that there must be, in all poetry, stretches of lazier language. “Almost everything has to be packaging material. The job of almost all the words is to suspend the essential words, which cannot exist without some context. … Don’t we generally do that with poems we love, recall a phrase, or a line or two, exactly, nestled inside some vaguer rhythmic texture?” She adds modestly: “It’s the best I can usually do.”
If there was one distinctive demand of the Modernist era, it was to minimize that “packaging material” and to give, to almost every line, one or another kind of distinctive power. Ezra Pound preached this doctrine but didn’t practice it that often in his poetry. Kay Ryan does the reverse. At her frequent best, she delivers just the kind of consistent punch she is reluctant to demand.
Leave a Reply