US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan Dazzles With Terse, Witty Words

For the past year, Kay Ryan has been serving as America's 16th poet laureate, tapped by the librarian of Congress to be ambassador for American poetry. She has published more than half a dozen books of collected poems. She is well-known for her compact, vivid and accessible verse.

The august marble-and-gilt halls of the Library of Congress, where Ryan has her official headquarters, seem an unlikely place for someone raised in what she calls the "glamour-free, ocean-free, hot, stinky, oil-rich, potato-rich" San Joaquin Valley of California. But then, growing up, Ryan didn't want to be poet.

"It [to declare oneself a poet] seemed like putting on airs," she says. "It seemed self-absorbed. It seemed like something that my oil well driller father wouldn't understand at all and that my mother would disapprove of, because it was just showing off."

Imagination, rigor define Ryan's work

Born in 1945, Ryan came of age during the 1960s and '70s, when highly personal, often soul-baring poetry was in vogue. That was definitely not her style.

"I liked much, much chillier, more controlled and thoughtful and witty and - for lack of a better term - 'intelligent' poetry, more than physical, expressive, confessional work," she says.

Still, Ryan says she found that poetry was nonetheless "possessing her mind." If she was reading prose, for example, "the prose would start rhyming, and it was kind of a little insanity taking me over," she recalls.

Ryan has a fluid, soaring imagination that couples - sometimes smoothly, often wildly - with the compact rigor she brings to her craft. Both qualities are evident in her poem "Killing Time":

Time is rubbery.
If you hide it
in the shrubbery
it will wait
till winter and
wash back out
with the rainwater.
You will find it
on your steps again
like the newspaper.
Time compresses.
Stuff it in the
couch corner and
it will spring out
some night or other
when you have guests.
One of whom guesses.
Time stretches.
Then it snaps back
leaving bare patches
that didn't happen.
Abandoned time hardens
like hidden gum.
People feel around.
Sooner or later
it will be found.

(Click to listen to Ryan read "Killing Time.")

Discovering her calling

It was not until 1976, when Ryan was 30, that she realized that poetry was her true calling. She had just come over the Hoosier Pass in the Rocky Mountains on a cross-country bicycle trip when she found herself in an altered state of awareness.

"I experienced some atomic alteration in my mind," she says, "… and I realized I had this incredible capacity to think like a laser, and I could think out to infinity. At first I was doing a few little 'kite tricks' with it. But then I realized, 'Oh, this is the perfect chance to get the answer to my question: Shall I be a writer?'"

But the "answer" she got was a question.

"And the question was, 'Do you like it?' That was the entire answer. And I just laughed because there was no question about it. I loved it! So I really went down the mountain knowing what I was going to do with the rest of my life."

Exploring the everyday

Such epiphanies notwithstanding, Ryan's poems often explore everyday human emotions such as hope, doubt and fear. In this poem, Ryan expresses a special fondness for relief. She observes that relief is a fleeting emotion which, unlike love, is always "paid for" in advance:

We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purge
the quick humility of witnessing a birth --
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.

(Click to listen to Ryan read "Relief.")

To date, Ryan has published more than a half-dozen collections of poetry, beginning with her self-published volume Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, in 1983. But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that she began to acquire a national reputation.

In the meantime, she taught remedial English at a community college in Marin County, California, and lived quietly with her longtime spouse, Carol Adair, who died in January 2009. Unlike many poets of her stature, Ryan was not interested in the busy academic swirl of conferences and university life.

An outsider longing for peace

Although Ryan serves as a chancellor the Academy of American Poets, when pressed, she places herself in the "outsider" tradition of American poetry.

With characteristic wry humor, Ryan acknowledges that some of her poems are essentially "complaints."

"What I am repeatedly asking for is less," she says. "Please make the world quieter, [and] take away some of this sensation."

She feels she is "overly visited" by the ideas of others and the "general onslaught" of the world.

"… And I'd like peace from it most of the time," she explains.

Ryan offers her poem "Crustacean Island" as an example of the kind of peace she sometimes seeks:

There could be an island paradise
where crustaceans prevail.
Click, click, go the lobsters
with their china mitts and
articulated tails.
It would not be sad like whales
with their immense and patient sieving
and the sobering modesty
of their general way of living.
It would be an island blessed
with only cold-blooded residents
and no human angle.
It would echo with a thousand castanets
and no flamencos.

(Click to listen to Ryan read "Crustacean Island.")

Poetry cares for itself, Ryan says

Ryan nearly turned down the offer to become U.S. poet laureate. She says she wanted to protect her privacy and keep writing without being distracted by the job's many public duties. Ultimately, Ryan accepted the post at her partner's urging. But she says hasn't used her highly visible role to "advocate" for poetry.

"I think poetry is indestructible, and I don't worry about it, and I don't think it needs the protection of me or the advocacy of me or anyone."

Ryan likens poetry to gold coins: "You can lose it in the couch, or in the ground, or anywhere and when it's dug up its going to be valuable, so that real poetry utterly protects itself, [and] takes care of itself."

Poet laureate advocates for education, careful attention to words

Having said that, she does have a couple of projects she is committed to as the poet laureate. She is a powerful advocate for community colleges, which she believes often offer an excellent education, but are generally underappreciated.

Ryan also says she'd like to make a little bit more "space" in between words.

"I think all words should have a fraction more time if they are spoken, or, [if] on the page, I think we should have a little more white space between words."

It was perhaps in that spirit that Ryan wrote a short little poem called "Dew":

As neatly as peas
in their green canoe,
as discreetly as beads
strung in a row,
sit drops of dew
along a blade of grass.
But unattached and
subject to their weight,
they slip if they accumulate.
Down the green tongue
out of the morning sun into the general damp, they're gone.

(Click to listen to Ryan read "Dew.")