Kay Ryan cuts a curious and contradictory figure. Her zippy, compact, user-friendly poetry has achieved wide popularity while remaining sceptical of the limelight:
"One can't work
by lime light", she quips. "A bowlful
right at
one's elbow
produces no
more than
a baleful
glow".
Despite a large readership, leading to a successful term as poet laureate of the United States from 2008-10, Ryan has mostly rejected the professionalised life of the contemporary writer. Instead she has continued to teach "remedial" classroom English (never creative writing) at a community college in San Jose, and lived quietly with her partner of 30-plus years, Carol Adair, until Adair's death in 2009. Such a steady, unassuming life, she insists, has enabled her to write. Her most recent accolades, a Pulitzer prize and a "Genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation, worth $500,000, seems unlikely to change this stance.
Ryan's poems draw much of their appeal from such contradictions. They reliably deliver a jolt or a laugh or both; but further contemplation nearly always discovers more substance, and more resistance, than you bargained for. In her poem about limelight, for example, we might notice that "baleful" comes from "bale", an Old English word for evil, and that this gave rise to "bale-fire", the name for a great blaze or a funeral pyre. Hence Ryan gives us "baleful glow", which rather suggests that limelight is not produced by celebrating people but by destroying them. This makes perfect sense, of course, in connection with "lime" itself, a substance notoriously helpful in dissolving human remains. Work like this can be underestimated. The description of a flamingo that opens Odd Blocks, Ryan's first UK publication, would seem to anticipate the cursory misreading: "she's / too exact and sinuous / to convince an audience / she's serious. The natural elect, / they think, would be less pink", cleverly playing the putative audience off against the actual reader, who now feels determined to think in entirely the opposite way. It is typical of Ryan that the sexually politicised "pink" (one thinks of the LGBTQ pink triangle, for example) chimes gently in the world of signs rather than commanding the poem.
Ryan's favourite verb is "to be", her favourite sentence the dead-pan, disembodied assertion: "There are thieves / in the mind"; or, "Any morning / can turn molten / without warning"; or, "We are always / really carrying / a ladder, but it's / invisible". The conviction with which these statements are made gives them a seductive authority. Ryan has said in an interview: "I like the sound of facts, but I don't care about them as facts. I like them as texture." In this respect, and in the tight, narrow, spring-loaded forms of her poems, Ryan has learned a lot from Emily Dickinson. However, where Dickinson writes, "I heard a Fly buzzwhen I died", Ryan would write: "We hear flies buzz / when we die", preferring third and second person modes that include the reader. Her poems are, as she puts it, "a mystery involving people, / but without the heat of people." First person has too much of that heat: when she does use it, the result can seem slightly melted, as in "Weak Forces", which considers
the sift left of resolve
sustained too long, the
strange internal shift
by which there's no knowing
if this is the road taken
or untaken.
Such scattergun rhyming is pure Ryan; the naked introspection not so much. Her allusion to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is revealing: although Ryan shares with Frost a sympathy for hard lives, and for the lyric poem as a stay against confusion, she has tended not to narrate so heroically the moment of decision, perhaps because she finds it tricky to locate in the midst of that "internal shift". "Odd Blocks", Ryan's title poem, contemplates a "Swiss-village / calendar" that shows a huddle of buildings among "glacier-scattered / thousand ton / monuments to / randomness", which the villagers now use to orientate themselves. The poem concludes:
Order is always
starting over.
And why not
also in the self,
the odd blocks,
all lost and left,
become first facts
toward which later
a little town
looks back?
The odd and the provisional are more important to Ryan than any discoverable grand design. "Odd Blocks" itself looks back to the early "Vacation", which admired "rocks arranged on the / basis of a plan, or plans, / inscrutable to modern man". What this demands of the observer is what Ryan demands of herself: "to stretch to be ignorant enough, / scoured to a clean vessel / as pure as the puzzle". The way each poem resets to zero can be frustrating, and it makes for a few failed experiments; but it also means her poems take precious little for granted. Ryan has made this selection in a typically uncompromising fashion: usually something from every book would make the cut, but Odd Blocks snips off the first 10 years of her career. Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends was self-published in 1983, and is now impossible to buy. Her second book, Strangely Marked Metal, appeared in 1985. Odd Blocks begins with "Flamingo Watching" (1994). It is a shame not to see the full development of Ryan's work; but, as with most of her poems, one enjoys the discipline of what is there in the light of what is not.
Frances Leviston's Public Dream is published by Picador.
