POETRY
Kay Ryan: The Best of It
/ Aneesa Davenport
03.02.10
The Best of It
by Kay Ryan
Grove Press
288 p.
When Kay Ryan reads one of her poems in public, she reads it twice. They’re so short that if she didn’t, the audience may miss one entirely, by glancing out the window or concentrating too hard on Ryan’s voice. She also reads it twice for the joy of it. Several years ago, positioned in front of a wall of windows at Santa Rosa Junior College’s Mahoney Library, the view reminded her of this poem, so she read it:
Green Hills
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 languor of their
rolling over.
Then she read it again. She is a careful and clear orator, but intends her poems to have enough cues in them so that any reader will hear the poems “inside the theatre of her own skull” just as she intends them. In the poem, it’s not the line breaks or the punctuation that guides the reader, but the cadence of the words themselves. The rhythm is established by the two unstressed syllables (“nor their” and “nor their”) followed by two stressed syllables (“green breast” and “green shoul-”). Then in the last lines, like an engine turning over, this rhythm is disrupted. The sounds themselves roll over each other, showing not just that the premise of the speaker—that the hills are not a body—is wrong, but proving it.
Then she laughs, or explains the spelling of a homophone (as in “Don’t Look Back,” which describes those who are “neckless,” like fish, not a necklace), or points out an embedded oronym (in “Turtle,” she uses the like-sounding phrases “a four-oared helmet” and “ill afford”). She will even describe the image she had in mind for the poem or where she was when she wrote it (usually in bed). Mostly her joy in writing poems comes from the rhymes and the assonance, which are both inevitable and surprising, and this joy is transferred to the reader as well. At readings, Ryan will call attention to a rhyme and comment, “I’m not sure I even knew it when I did it,” but be certain that the sound in one word suggested another, and that she realized the meaning later. Any poet versed in writing in form will recognize how generative self-imposed constraints can be. While her poems seem to be created from pure sound untarnished by understanding, they also feel true.
Most of Kay Ryan’s poems present an argument, which allows for the reader the gratification of mental exertion and the thrill of discovery. Each poem starts you in one place—often by reflecting on a common saying, such as “a drop in the bucket” or “the fabric of life”; dissecting a natural phenomenon; or scrutinizing a belief assumed to be universal (as in the often-quoted “Blandeur,” which pleads for grandeur to be suppressed/for less to happen)—and extends that metaphor or examination to its farthest possible conclusion. In the end you are looking at the subject from a completely different point of view, and you feel smart. You feel like you’re the one who figured it out—and with no effort! This is the pleasure of reading, and you’re grateful to the poet for it.
by Kay Ryan
Grove Press
288 p.
When Kay Ryan reads one of her poems in public, she reads it twice. They’re so short that if she didn’t, the audience may miss one entirely, by glancing out the window or concentrating too hard on Ryan’s voice. She also reads it twice for the joy of it. Several years ago, positioned in front of a wall of windows at Santa Rosa Junior College’s Mahoney Library, the view reminded her of this poem, so she read it:
Green Hills
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 languor of their
rolling over.
Then she read it again. She is a careful and clear orator, but intends her poems to have enough cues in them so that any reader will hear the poems “inside the theatre of her own skull” just as she intends them. In the poem, it’s not the line breaks or the punctuation that guides the reader, but the cadence of the words themselves. The rhythm is established by the two unstressed syllables (“nor their” and “nor their”) followed by two stressed syllables (“green breast” and “green shoul-”). Then in the last lines, like an engine turning over, this rhythm is disrupted. The sounds themselves roll over each other, showing not just that the premise of the speaker—that the hills are not a body—is wrong, but proving it.
Then she laughs, or explains the spelling of a homophone (as in “Don’t Look Back,” which describes those who are “neckless,” like fish, not a necklace), or points out an embedded oronym (in “Turtle,” she uses the like-sounding phrases “a four-oared helmet” and “ill afford”). She will even describe the image she had in mind for the poem or where she was when she wrote it (usually in bed). Mostly her joy in writing poems comes from the rhymes and the assonance, which are both inevitable and surprising, and this joy is transferred to the reader as well. At readings, Ryan will call attention to a rhyme and comment, “I’m not sure I even knew it when I did it,” but be certain that the sound in one word suggested another, and that she realized the meaning later. Any poet versed in writing in form will recognize how generative self-imposed constraints can be. While her poems seem to be created from pure sound untarnished by understanding, they also feel true.
Most of Kay Ryan’s poems present an argument, which allows for the reader the gratification of mental exertion and the thrill of discovery. Each poem starts you in one place—often by reflecting on a common saying, such as “a drop in the bucket” or “the fabric of life”; dissecting a natural phenomenon; or scrutinizing a belief assumed to be universal (as in the often-quoted “Blandeur,” which pleads for grandeur to be suppressed/for less to happen)—and extends that metaphor or examination to its farthest possible conclusion. In the end you are looking at the subject from a completely different point of view, and you feel smart. You feel like you’re the one who figured it out—and with no effort! This is the pleasure of reading, and you’re grateful to the poet for it.