Poet Kay Ryan: A profile

Readers might notice a touch of irony in this poem, given that Ryan has obviously chosen hope over despair throughout her career. She didn't stop writing even when her first two books - one of which was privately printed by friends - drew no critical attention. Instead, she maintained her work routine, which she wryly describes as breakfast, reading the paper, and then "a lying session," since she writes in bed, with an old black cat holding down the covers. On her nightstand sit several yellow pads of paper and a stack of "difficult books," which she dips into before starting to work, to "help get my mind up to speed." (Recently she has been reading "Anathemas and Admirations," by E.M. Cioran; Walter Benjamin's "Illuminations"; and "The Rings of Saturn," by W. G. Sebald.)

Week after week, month after month, she continued with her distinctive approach, writing short poems even when long narratives became the fashion. She also stuck with her signature style, which is complex, multi-layered, and sometimes sly, rather than trying to write more conventional lyrics.

Her poems, she says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as "It's always darkest before the dawn" or "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

"I think, 'What about those chickens?' " she says, "and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés."

Some do, perhaps, but many wouldn't dare to enter such familiar territory. Ryan, however, adds depth and so many surprises that the silliest clichés become fertile ground. "The other shoe," from 2003, is a classic example:

The other shoe
Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.
If the undropped
didn't congregate
with the undropped.
But nothing can
stop the mid-air
collusion of the
unpaired above us
acquiring density
and weight. We
feel it accumulate.

What she feels building, during work sessions, are various elements - rhyme, metaphor, a narrative thread, and matter transmuting into new shapes - that create a certain thrust in her mind. Once she begins writing, she continues until a complete poem has emerged. She can't stop, she says, because so much is happening at once. She may go back and revise later - some poems have taken 18 or 19 drafts - but by then the poem will seem new to her. Her memory, as her partner says, is very short-term, "read-only."

Some readers and critics have compared her to the metaphysical poets - her work does seem to have a certain omniscience - but Ryan doesn't align herself with any historical or modern group of writers. Likewise, she does not claim a specific set of religious beliefs. She was raised in the "Church of Proximity," she says, meaning her family attended whichever church was closest to where they were living in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert.

What she values most about her patchwork religious education is the collection of stories she learned, which allow her, in some cases, to strike a deep, universal nerve. At other times, the tales establish common ground, which she then transforms with sly humor.

The Fourth Wise Man
The fourth wise man
disliked travel. If
you walk, there's the
gravel. If you ride,
there's the camel's attitude.
He far preferred
to be inside in solitude
to contemplate the star
that had been getting
so much larger
and more prolate lately -
stretching vertically
(like the souls of martyrs)
toward the poles
(or like the yawns of babies).

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