Arts

The Outsider Artist

Assessing Kay Ryan, our new poet laureate.

Kay Ryan, who has just been named America's new poet laureate, is a miniaturist. She favors compression the way Walt Whitman favored expansion. Like oysters, she has said, her poems take shape around "an aggravation." They are also small (most are only about 20 lines long), rich, and dense. A single one might not always make a meal, but a well-selected plate will satiate most readers.

If Ryan's language is spare, her concerns are broad and philosophical. A typical Ryan poem begins with a proposition—"Everything contains some/ silence" or "It's what we can't/ know that interests/ us." She explores old bromides, wondering what the fabric of life is like ("stretchy") or what it might be like to live on an island where silence is revered. Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them. Here's "Green Hills," from The Niagara River, her sixth (and most recent) book:

Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the langour of their
rolling over.

This little lyric contains many of Ryan's hallmarks: the juxtaposition of unlike things (green mountains and human flesh); the skinny, syncopated lines ("are not/ flesh in any sense"), which propel the unfolding thought by emphasizing the musicality of the language; and heaps of internal rhyme ("shoulder" and "langour" and "rolling over"), which help create a sense of closure. Internal rhyme and assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) are crucial to the success of Ryan's poems, in part because her epistemological investigations of the human condition can hardly be called completist or definitive; rhyme adds a crucial layer of complexity. She practices dipstick philosophy, taking a quick reading of the oil in the motor and slamming the hood. She moves away from her themes as rapidly as she engages them, which may be why some critics have compared her to Emily Dickinson, even though her dramatic imagination is far more detached—less blasphemous and exalted—than her predecessor's.

Born in California in 1945, Ryan, who succeeds Charles Simic, has been described as an "outsider," largely because she has managed not to be drawn into the great peristalsis that digests most "creative writers" in America today; she has taught remedial English in California's Marin County for many years. And yet it's hardly a surprise that the Library of Congress tapped her. Ryan rejects the pained, stylized self-consciousness that characterizes so much contemporary poetry. Where many poets today are engaged in issues and questions that would be meaningful mainly to other practitioners of the art, Ryan's concerns about the nature of reality are relatively translatable to a general audience. She has called herself a "rehabilitator of clichés," an apt description of the way the ordinary is transformed through close attention so that a mockingbird becomes a "distempered/ emperor of parts" or the moon becomes "evening's ticket/ punched with a/ round or a crescent." What might be a geyser of explication in another poet's hands is condensed in hers to a single shot: "The satisfactions/ of agreement are/ immediate as sugar—/ a melting of the/ granular, a syrup/ that lingers, shared/ not singular./ Many prefer it."

Tags: Kay Ryan, poetry

Meghan O'Rourke is a founding editor of Double X and the author of Halflife, a book of poems.

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