1.

Reading Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, one is struck by the note on the back cover:

“A jewel. Beautifully articulated.” (Patti Smith, from Instagram)

One is, of course, delighted to see Patti Smith lay one of Ryan’s favorite complimentary words—articulated—to rest on a social media grave that it may travel like an everlasting silk buttercup to grace the book’s cover matter.

As for the essays, themselves, one appreciates the continuity of Ryan’s contrarian keynote— as if she put her foot on the sustain pedal and loved the sound so much she could not let go for an instant—“The whole ball of who we are” brought to bear on the downstroke. The performer’s commitment to tone at the expense of dynamics is remarkable; it would ruin a lesser poet or pianist.

That’s the uncanny part: the way Ryan’s prosodic voice leans on the experience of marginality, or a view of the self an Unimportant Poet which is at odds with reality. Perhaps this sense of alienation is tied to her experiences as an LGBTQA person in California, or maybe it’s just the soil of a certain Americana.

In “Con and Pro,” Ryan draws an exclusive circle: “My poets are a dryish people. Lonely, and what of it. They don’t gather round a campfire.” This circle doesn’t include Walt Whitman, whose “big stride” is too “bulky” and “all-encompassing”… “I like skinny-bodied poets, the stringy ones who don’t impress the boys on the beach,” she writes. The shape of the poem, its body, is an aesthetic matter for Ryan, and she likes them lean.

Nevertheless, Ryan’s story of literary origins is as American as it is heartwarming. She and her partner, Carol Adair, taught for over thirty years at a small community college in California. While serving two consecutive terms as U.S. Poet Laureate, starting in 2008, Ryan used her platform to champion community colleges. If there is a prestigious, literary financial grant, Ryan has won it. President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal. By 2010 (the year she won a MacArthur Genius Grant), Ryan had published no less than 25 poems in the New Yorker, averaging a rate of two New Yorker poem-pubs per annum since 1995. If this isn’t a sign of being among the Established, one might wonder if establishment even exists.

In her own words, Ryan remains a “whistle-blower,” “an advocate for underpraised and underfunded community colleges across the nation”:

“I was reluctant to think of myself as a writer because it required a kind of emotional exposure that I didn’t want to commit to. I never liked the image of the poet, and I still don’t to this day. There is something way too romantic about it, and way too emotional and way too posturing. I come from clean-scrubbed people who would be embarrassed by that.”

In the words of others: “Ryan’s compact poems – which have been compared to the short, humorous piano pieces of composer Erik Satie and to Faberge eggs – are typically less than 20 lines long and her lines often contain fewer than six syllables.”

2.

The fear of being influenced by literary trends comes up in everything from her surly, lovely gripes about AWP to her writings about other poets. Anxiety of influence is present more as a systemic fear than a nuanced, particular one, and in this concern, one senses a fidelity, a first principle.

Poetry, for Ryan, is "this impossible pang" where the poem, itself, functions as a "trap — that is a release." It enables us to enter a room filled with treasure — a room available whenever we choose to enter it —but we can take nothing out. We don't go home with a receipt. The experience of the poem is singular, even when repeated.

As to whether she considers her audience, Ryan nods. Of course she does—and doubly. One part of her hopes they will sit up in their graves:

“I am at the table of the gods and I want them to like me. 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. And I would add that the noble dead cannot be pleased with imitations of themselves; they are already quite full of themselves.”

The other part plays the poetry game, and “seeks good journals for the poems and good presses for the books, accepts reading dates and agrees to interviews, so that the poet might gain name recognition, by means of which the poet's poems might reach an audience and rise or fall fairly, based upon their merit instead of simply resting upon the bottom because nobody ever saw them.”

3.

Ryan often begins an essay by clarifying the essay was solicited. She writes about walking because an editor asked for her thoughts on poetry and walking. Hence, a brief essay on walking appears. Ryan describes a poetics of peripatetic observation, noting “the brain anticipates significance; it doesn’t know which edge may in fifty yards knit to which other edge, so everything is held, charged with a subliminal glitter along its raw sides.”

Ryan writes against notebooking with the toothiness of a brilliant marketer generating buzz for the scandalous surprise of posthumous notebook publication. The problem with note booking is Kodak, or the Kodak moment which develops memory a certain way, rather than allowing memory to return and mingle and exert subterranean influence. Her concern circles "the memory that might result from repetition." The details of the snapshot are less compelling than the "long way of knowing,” and "we must be less in love with foreground if we want to see far." Not for her, the spicy art being devised by those who take photography as a disruptive medium. Not for her, the Barthesian punctum. Notebooks enact a "dangerous piety" of preservation. They are religious in their remembering, and this religiosity tends to sanctify the notes. Loss is a gift which enables finding and discovering. Loss, for Ryan, is part of life. 

Although she isn’t one for notebooks on principle, Ryan certainly reads them. And reviews them — she prefers Robert Frost’s poems to his notebooks or his biography, noting that “the main thing one discovers in the notebooks is Frost's great fidelity to himself.”

In an essay on nonsense and slant, Ryan uses Edward Lear's "To Make Gosky Patties" as a slant ars. She lists the elements which are unique to this poem, and to poetry more generally (though certainly this is true for certain kinds of poems more than others). Among them:

"An invented goal”—because no one actually needs gosky patties; no one even imagined a need for them before this poem..

"Cowbird technique" — The Cowbird lays eggs in another bird's nest and borrows the form of it. " Nonsense isn't shapeless"… it comes to us in order forms, rhymes, limericks. "You can tell real nonsense from garbage because nonsense is shaped and tense."

“Exactness.” “Incongruity”. “Awkward proximities.” “A sense of immience” — the build-up towards a sneeze, that sense of a game underneath. “A highly personal idea of cause and effect,” which is to say, relationships and time. “The reader made into co-conspirator.” “A perfect absence of sentiments.” “ Indifference to outcome.” “Frustration of ordinary expectations.” “A wonderful sense of helplessness.” A modified glee. An object which resembles delight.

4.

Confession: Ryan’s essay on AWP was my favorite. It begins in the key of not-for-me (a key I know intimately), the drizzle of schadenfreude one expects more from minor writers like myself than major ones like Kay Ryan.

Let it be clear: not for Ryan, the academic conferencing and inner circulariums. Not for Ryan the movie set, the theatre, orchestral music, team sports, the migraine sure to appear alongside a crowd. Instead, Ryan will have “the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught…. the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze….” She will have the metaphysical in plain language without extra pickles, hold the mayo.

How she ends up at AWP is simple: she was “invited to attend as an outsider, and to write a piece for Poetry.” How one can be an “outsider” while serving as US Poet Laureate is never explained or expounded upon. Presumably, all American poet laureates get to wear the tremendous laurels while also maintaining an excited foot or steed in the Outsider-Poet stable. A poet laureate may be under-recognized, under appreciated, and under-funded but they are also as Inside as one gets. It’s important to recognize that so that words continue to have meaning. Pyramids aren’t expressions of belonging—they are material, physical objects whose definition isn’t related to emotional events.

Planning to go while retaining her “alienation,” Ryan acknowledges this fun is only possible due to her “age,” defined as the time when one is no longer young and unpublished. Although Ryan conflates poetry prestige with age, assuming that all poets start young, get their degrees, and ripen into fruition, one is tempted to overlook it, as one must overlook such conflations regularly in certain circles. One overlooks such things because the skid-marks are familiar. “Maybe I would never have been influenced, as I feared I would, but to this day I believe I needed to guard against something, even if that something was imaginary,” Ryan writes.

“The most important thing a beginning writer may have going for her is her bone-deep impulse to defend a self that at the time might not look all that worth getting worked up about”—certainly all of us have been there, staring at the shape of the ice pick which masquerades as a migraine in a room where no one speaks your native language and editors, like all of humanity, struggle to balance calls from ailing kids with the demands of the book fair.

"Simone Weil would have starved herself to death before she would have gone to AWP," Ryan announces.  

“But you lost the opportunity to stay as pure as your idol by having kids,” my husband reminds. And he is right. Like Weil, I love humanity so much I can’t help being infuriated by humans. Unlike Weil, I am beholden to more than my ideals, my hopes, my life.

O, that level of moral purity - impeccable, impossible, and unlivable, how I miss it! How I mourn the way motherhood revokes it. I was so pure before looking young mammals in the eye and swearing that ghosts would not hurt them. My commitment to nonsense outweighs any credible moral claims I can make about the universe, but I long to be that clean again, to be abominable as the white cartoon snowman. 

Reading Ryan is like seeing myself in the mirror of my own Puritan peccadillos — minus the magnificent fellowships, awards, and prizes, of course, and the laurels of official Outsider Poet status.

5.

If I keep trying to understand Ryan’s see-sawing between Poetry-As-Nonsensical-Delight-Raft and Poetry-As-Space-Of- Moral-Purity, it’s because she is serious about seriousness, yet conflicted about self-reflective writing.

There is an anti-confessionalism current in her poetics that seems related to notebooking, a logic the says the mirror is the mirror but only the poem which pretends not to be a mirror is a good mirror. I wondered if it was the seriousness, the open-handed earnesty of notebooks, which makes them distasteful or decadent? Remember what happened to punk in the late 90’s— how the divide between the unaffiliated decadent and the identitarian straight-edged kept simmering below the surface until we fell in love and sold out and resurrected to find Trump got elected as the most hardcore members of our former punk coteries unveiled their Proud Boy flags on social media?

This is not to suggest Kay Ryan is punk but, rather to trace the tonal defiance, the countercultural opting-out, which can robe an ontological puritanism,and which starts off in the tempo-marking of punk, shooting a bird at the sunshine happy posters that lie from the walls of school hallways. I have no conclusions to draw that aren’t self-indictments, and maybe I’m looking too hard at a point which wants to be a line, as one is inclined to do in a notebook.

Despite the anti-sentimental keynote, Ryan raves about Milan Kundera’s prose, particularly his view of forgetting as a form of remembering. There’s also a fantastic section on Tantalus (page 106), and a moving, inspiring story of poetic origin (page 114). There are warnings, sirens, injunctions, and permissions. There is so much one can say about Ryan that I prefer to end without saying it—not because “my people” were “clean-scrubbed”, but because my people are complicated, messy, raucous, known for their tonal thickness.

I loved Kay Ryan’s prosodic company for its consistent contrary-key, and the She insisting upon it. Even though Robert Frost is not my hero, I loved reading her rapture. It is instructive to study the pantheons of wonderful poets because humans are more interesting and thoughtful when describing what they love than when ranting about what they hate.

Ryan mentions "the hot thing" in poems—the things which can burn us or start fires, those with the potential to combust or illuminate. One cannot make a poem if one removes all the hot things, since "it is the job of poetry to remain open to the whole catastrophe." And I love this as a note on revisions. I wrote it down. I refused to forget it just in case I could use it or share it:

When revising, look at the poem. Find the hot thing. If there is more than one hot thing, how do they relate? Are they even related? Are both needed? Honor the hot thing/s by not asking them to carry too much - give them space to breathe. Remember, a conflagration needs air, oxygen – and that space around it is part of the weight, part of what creates the possibility of fire.

Too many fires in one poem makes leaving the room easier. Or, if one wishes to make the leaving easy, then be sure to use direct address, as Ryan does in “Blandeur”:

Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

And don’t be surprised if posthumous notebooks appear. I, for one, look forward to sitting in a meadow with a cold beer and all the gorgeous contrary that is Kay Ryan doing the thing she said she wouldn't do until someone invited her.