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".

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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. 

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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

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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.

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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