Kay Ryan, the Peeving of Poets, and the Incredible Hidden Sedgwick Hall

Last night, I drove out to Rockhurst University to see former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan read as part of the Midwest Poets Series. Typically, driving to the heart of the Plaza to see a poetry reading on a Thursday night isn't my idea of a good time,  but Kay Ryan is a self-avowed introvert-curmudgeon. She makes a lot of fuss about not being a part of the poetry community, enough so that I thought that this event might be my only opportunity to see her read. 

Kay Ryan

So I went, giddy and tired and easily disoriented as I was from my long work week. I had a very hard time finding Sedgwick Hall (mostly because I didn't realize that Rockhurst is just a tiny, unmarked, nearly invisible wart on the buttocks of  the UMKC campus). I drove around for twenty minutes, walked around for another twenty, and asked four different people before I finally stumbled across the building completely by chance!

I was very late, but I decided that half a Kay Ryan reading was better than no Kay Ryan reading at all. And I was right. Despite her hermetic self-image, Ryan was actually very well-spoken and funny, and she charmed the audience with ease. She had the funny habit of reading her poems aloud twice, which was great, actually. 

Ryan's poems are all small--clever, compact little things that work very hard to say something very smart in as little space as possible. Her poems are elegant and deep and often funny, and they really beg for two or three re-readings--despite their size and apparent accessibility, they require thought and patience.

Here are two of my favorites from the reading. I especially liked what Ryan said about "Leaving Spaces"--she believes that people are uncomfortable with emptiness and quiet in life--and I've always loved the humor, fantasticality, and burning truthfulness of "He Lit a Fire with Icicles".

----------

Leaving Spaces

By Kay Ryan

From Flamingo Watching

Found on The Poetry Foundation's website

It takes a courageous
person to leave spaces
empty. Certainly any
artist in the Middle Ages
felt this timor, and quickly
covered space over
with griffins, sea serpents,
herbs and brilliant carpets
of flowers – things pleasant
or unpleasant, no matter.
Of course they were cowards
and patronized by cowards
who liked their swards as
filled with birds as leaves.
All of them believed in
sudden edges and completely
barren patches in the mind,
and they didn’t want to
think about them all the time. 

----------

He Lit a Fire with Icicles

by Kay Ryan 

From The Niagara River

Found on The Poetry Foundation's website 

For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001

This was the work

of St. Sebolt, one

of his miracles:

he lit a fire with

icicles. He struck

them like a steel

to flint, did St.

Sebolt. It

makes sense

only at a certain

body heat. How

cold he had

to get to learn

that ice would

burn. How cold

he had to stay.

When he could

feel his feet

he had to

back away

----------

Despite how much I like Ryan, I did manage to rub her the wrong way when she signed my book after the reading. I asked her if she read a lot of Marianne Moore. In response, Ryan scowled at me. "Well," she said, "I read her long after she could have affected me. I read her when I was young. She bugged the hell out of me." She paused, squinted her eyes up at me, black fountain pen poised over my copy of The Niagara River. "You know, the problem with being a female poet is that you get compared to other female poets all the time." Another squint, a little scowl. "You know?"

"Uh, yeah," I said. "I suppose. Thanks again--it was a lovely reading!" I said, backing away from the table, trying not to giggle. I had peeved a poet! A poet laureate, in fact! (It seemed like some dubious sort of accomplishment.)

I was thinking, It's not like I compared you to Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton or Rita Dove, lady! It's a question that makes good sense to me. I was thinking about "To a Snail," one of my favorite poems by Marianne Moore. If ever a poet made a virtue of contractility, it is Kay Ryan, whether she likes to think so about herself or not.

----------

To A Snail

By Marianne Moore

 

If “compression is the first grace of style”,
you have it.  Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles”,
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

Marianne Moore

Happy December

Happy first of December, everybody!

I'm always a little bit excited about December. It's not the holidays I love--I'm not a huge Christmas person--and it's not exactly the weather; I don't usually like the cold, and I hate having to wear gloves to drive my car or type at the office. But I've always liked winter. At the beginning of the season, the cold feels crisp and new and intoxicating. The first snow flakes look cleansing and bright, and roads and cars aren't yet covered in that awful salty, sandy, dirty sludge that seems to epitomize the February doldrums to me. It feels like a new world is beginning each December, and I like that.

Besides, I've been ready for November to be done for awhile now. It was not my best month ever.  :P

In other news, last night, I walked out in the cold and the dark to see a reading downtown. The two authors were local-ish (native Kansans from a town an hour away). One wrote essays and the other poetry, and they were both underwhelming. They did not write excellent or surprising or even terribly engaging literature, but I tried to listen to it with a better attitude than I used to. In the past, I've been a terrible literary hater; I've gotten angry over the success of poems and essays and even people that I don't like or respect. But that's a cheap and miserly way to live, and it certainly wasn't making me any more successful when I ripped on others' work.

These days, I'm trying to remember that all literature, even literature that I *ahem* disagree with, was written by someone who was doing his/her best to write, to survive, and to be happy. All literature is written by someone who is trying to learn his/her own song and sing it, and their bravery, persistence, and stubborn individuality is something to respect, even if the writing itself irks me.

Guess What I'm Doing Tomorrow

Oh, nothing much, just flying to State College, Pennsylvania to see Susan Orlean read as Penn State's 2010 Steven Fisher Writer in Residence. Which Susan Orlean? Oh, yeah, that Susan Orlean who just happens to be my favorite living writer of non-fiction. I'm going to drink Yuenglings with her and stuff. At least I will be when I'm not stuffing my face with Waffle Shop and carousing with my friends from grad school who I haven't seen in a year and a half.

So, you know, no big weekend.


*pause*

AHHHHHOMIGOODNESSSOEXCITEDIT'SGOINGTOBEWAYAWESOMEYAY!!!

*ahem*

You get the idea.  ;)

I'll see you next week, blog friends!

"Gaity, or Truth in Sheep's Clothing"

I got home from a reading a few hours ago. There were five readers: three fiction writers, one non-fiction writer, and one poet turned non-fiction-ist. The reading was fine--it was a little long, a little dry, and in a restaurant filled with smoke from an over-heated pizza oven--and only one writer really stuck out to me. She was one of the non-fiction writers, and she was writing about growing up as an evangelical Christian in a public high school.

In most ways, her writing was no different from her peers': her language flowed smoothly, her scenes were rife with clear imagery and distinct characters, and her prose felt polished and lively. But she differed from everyone else because she made the audience laugh, and not in a cruel way. Even though she was writing about the misadventures of an overeager young girl fumbling her way toward an identity outside of her religion, she was tender about her past self and her former friends. She acknowledged that her audience might not identify with her upbringing or her past beliefs, but she never sacrificed her past self cruelly, selling herself out for cheap satire. Her essay worked because she was unashamed of her past and because she treated her past self gently, with great kindness and great levity.

Her writing made me think of Dostoevsky, a little bit, and of Michel de Montaigne and Jane Austen in that she was capable of telling her story with both levity and compassion, something which is exceedingly rare. The other readers read very nicely crafted pieces, but they took themselves awful seriously. There was a lot of imagery and profound symbolism in their pieces, but not a lot of joy.

I've been thinking about the importance of gentle humor because of E.B. White's excellent One Man's Meat. Early in the book, White describes "a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world" who has "pledged himself never to write anything that wasn't constructive and significant and liberty-loving."

"I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news. [. . .] Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or chinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy. [. . .] In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom--he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. His gravest concern is lest gaiety, or truth in sheep's clothing, somewhere gain a foothold, lest joy in some unguarded moment be unconfined. I honestly don't believe that a humorist should take the veil today; he should wear his bells night and day, and squeeze the uttermost jape, even though he may feel that he should be writing a strong letter to the Herald Times."

 After a long stint in graduate school, where satire and self-deprecation often took the place of true gaiety and good-humoredness, I'm a little more appreciative of writers who, like E. B. White and tonight's reader, can combine humor and kindness to get to the heart of whatever they're after.

Robert Pinsky Comes to Town

Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, is coming to Kansas City this Thursday. I'm going to try to attend, but this week's a little busy, so who knows?

I've seen Pinsky read before at AWP. He's a great reader: he performs his poems with energy, modulation, and charisma. But, more importantly, his poems are great: they're intellectual, clever, meandering, and delightfully strange.

My favorite work of his is a chapbook titled First Things to Hand. Each poem in the collection is based on an object that the poet can see from his desk. Though he begins each poem with a familiar object, his mind wanders far and wide in each poem, leaping back and forth between the familiar, the imagined, and ancient mythologies, including the Hindu and Norse pantheons.

My copy of First Things To Hand is packed right now, so I won't include a sample poem here. But I will leave you with this clip from "What Shall We Teach the Young?", a lecture Pinsky delivered in 2002. Throughout his career as a poet and as poet laureate, Pinsky has served as an excellent advocate for poetry as a part of everyday life (for example, he initiated the Favorite Poem Project and edited An Invitation to Poetry and Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud). I love what this essay says about why people should read poetry, especially children, and why verse is such a vital part of human culture.

If you like this quote, I urge you to read the whole lecture at the Grantmakers in the Arts website; it's a fascinating read.
---------------

From "What Shall We Teach the Young?"

By Robert Pinsky

“We crave difficulty. Music, and art in general, fills that craving, sometimes profoundly [. . . .] I submit to you that what we now call education in the arts is not an ornament, or a decoration, or a beauty, or a nice thing to do with learning, but that it resides at the center of the process of learning. [. . .] I have a superstitious and abiding sense that insofar as you remove the instrument case [and the ability of a child to perform art], it’s not only a local matter. It’s extending back to defy or abrogate a chain that goes to our origins. Intelligence and learning are associated with art, with all the arts. They’re at the core, not peripheral. The human ability to learn, the relish for difficulty, for physical engagement of difficulty, for something that comes from somewhere—these have profound origins.”

Laura Moriarty: Best-Selling Author and Lawrence Native

Last Thursday, I went to a reading by novelist Laura Moriarty at the Lawrence Public Library. The reading was great fun; Moriarty was outgoing and entertaining (which you can't always expect from an author), and her new book sounds fascinating. I'm especially interested to read it because the heroine (Veronica) grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, attended KU, and is a resident assistant in the dorms, all of which I share in common with her. I think it will be exciting and strange to read a novel set in Kansas about someone who is at least a little like myself.

Anyway, the article below is an attempt to write a newspaper-style report on the reading. I was trying to make it terse, clean, informative, and focused on Moriarty as a writer. If you have any suggestions for improving it, please let me know! And if you want to know more about Moriarty as a person and her life in Lawrence, you can read this great little interview from Gavon Laessig of the Lawrence Journal-World.
_______________

Lawrencians Fall for Local Novelist
August 8, 2009

Not every novelist compares herself to a Border Collie and forces her characters to eat meat, but Laura Moriarty, a Lawrence resident and creative writing professor at the University of Kansas, is not every novelist. As she read to a crowd of over 70 readers at the Lawrence Public Library on August 6, the young author was relaxed, personable, and often funny, easily charming her hometown crowd, many of whom (if you go by their questions) had already read both of her previous novels: The Center of Everything, published in 2003, and 2007's The Rest of Her Life.

Moriarty's newest novel While I'm Falling, released this month by Hyperion, follows Veronica, a 20-year-old junior at KU, as she deals with the aftermath of her father returning from a business trip to find a young, shirt-less roofer sleeping in his bed. An expensive divorce follows, and Veronica finds herself scraping through college as her parents battle over money.

Moriarty weaves several storylines together in what she describes as her most plot-oriented novel yet: the parents' divorce; Veronica's mother's waning finances; Veronica's dislike of her job as a dorm resident assistant; Veronica's childhood friend Haley who undergoes a radical transformation to become the black-clad “Simone”; and Jimmy, a suspicious security guard who involves Veronica in his shady dealings.

Though Moriarty read two sections from her novel, she spent most of the hour-long reading responding to the audience's questions, including the perennial favorite of readers everywhere, “Is this book autobiographical?”

Though Moriarty also attended KU (where she earned a B.A. in Social Work and an M.A. in Creative Writing), worked as an R.A. in the dorms, and had parents who divorced while she was in college, Moriarty is adamant that, from there, she and Veronica are completely different people. When working on Falling, Moriarty made Veronica eat meat in as many scenes as possible to help keep Veronica “distinct” from her staunchly vegetarian self.

Moriarty says that the secret to her success as a novelist is writing 1,000 words a day, no matter how long it takes. She finds the most challenging part of writing to be blending her plot lines together and knowing when she should write about each character and conflict. She plans the details of each character's storyline very carefully before eventually “braiding” these lines together into a single plot sequence. When writing The Center of Everything, she used a chart hung on the wall of her home to stay organized; for Falling, she followed a very thorough outline.

As the evening wrapped up, one reader said, “You are a very prolific young author. Have you already started on your next novel?” Moriarty nodded and smiled. “Oh, yes,” she said. “The hardest times for me are when I'm coming up with an idea for a novel, so I try to start on the next one as quickly as possible. I'm like a Border Collie,” she laughed. “I like to know where I'm going.”