Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: July 17, 2008

When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Kay Ryan, 62, will become the country’s 16th poet laureate.
Related
Web Extra: Selected Poems by Kay Ryan (July 17, 2008)
Times Topics: Kay Ryan


Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1994, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

Dana Gioia, a poet and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was an early supporter of Ms. Ryan’s work, describing her as the “thoughtful, bemused, affectionate, deeply skeptical outsider.”

“She would certainly be part of the world if she could manage it,” he said. “She has certain reservations. That is what makes her like Dickinson in some ways.”

Poets, editors, critics and academics around the country offered advice to James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, about whom to choose to succeed Charles Simic as the nation’s 16th poet laureate, who was appointed 2007. Ms. Ryan’s work has “this quality of simplicity; it’s highly accessible poetry,” Dr. Billington said. “She takes you through little images to see a very ordinary thing or ordinary sentiment in a more subtle and deeper way.”

Ms. Ryan likes to take familiar images and clichés and reincarnate them in a wholly original form. “The Other Shoe” reads:

Oh if it were
only the other
shoe hanging
in space before
joining its mate.

Her poems are spare. “An almost empty suitcase, that’s what I want my poems to be, few things,” Ms. Ryan said. “The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying.”

Ms. Ryan grew up in small towns throughout the San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert. Her mother taught elementary school. A nervous person, her mother craved quiet, so there was virtually no television or radio playing in the home, Ms. Ryan said. In “Shark’s Teeth” she writes, “Everything contains some silence.” The poem continues:

An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark.

Her father was a dreamer. She once said he could “fail at anything,” having tried selling Christmas trees, drilling oil wells and working in a chromium mine.

It was after his death, when she was 19, that she started writing poems. But Ms. Ryan said she always had mixed feelings about it. “I wanted to do it, but I didn’t want to expose myself,” she said.

After briefly attending Antelope Valley College, she transferred to U.C.L.A., where she earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English.

She moved to Marin County in 1971 and lives there now, with her partner, Carol Adair.

In 1976 she finally realized that she could not escape the poet inside her. She had decided to ride a bicycle from California to Virginia in 80 days. Riding along the Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she said, she felt an incredible opening up, “an absence of boundaries, an absence of edges, as if my brain could do anything.”

“Finally I can ask the question: Can I be a writer?” The answer came back as a question, she said. “Do you like it?”

“So it was quite simple for me. I went home and began to work.”

Public recognition came slowly. It took 20 years for her to receive acclaim for her work. “All of us want instant success,” she said. “I’m glad I was on a sort of slow drip.”

Ms. Ryan has carved out a life conducive to poetry writing. She has taught the same remedial English course at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., for more than 30 years. When asked if she thought her new position would make it harder to write, she replied, “No, uh-uh. I think it will make it impossible.”

She has published six books of poetry and her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books.

One of her first duties as poet laureate is an appearance at the National Book Festival on Sept. 27 on the National Mall in Washington. More formally she will kick off the Library of Congress’s annual literary series on Oct. 16 by reading her own work. The library doesn’t require much of its laureates, although in recent years many have undertaken projects to broaden poetry’s reach to children and adults. Ms. Ryan has no definite plans, but said she might like to “celebrate the Library of Congress,” adding “maybe I’ll issue library cards to everyone.”

For a woman who once shrank from exposing herself, this new position will put her in the public eye more than ever. But at this point Ms. Ryan is philosophical: “I realized that whatever we do or don’t do, we’re utterly exposed.”

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WEB EXTRA
Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

Published: July 17, 2008
Kay Ryan has been chosen to be the country's 16th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress.

A CAT/A FUTURE
A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

BLANDEUR
If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

THE NIAGARA RIVER
As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice — as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced —
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

HOME TO ROOST
The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small —
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

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.

THINGS SHOULDN'T BE SO HARD
A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.


"A Cat/A Future" from Elephant Rocks by Kay Ryan, Copyright © 1996 by Kay Ryan. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

"Blandeur" from Say Uncle by Kay Ryan, Copyright © 2000 by Kay Ryan. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

"The Niagara River," "Home to Roost," "Green Hills" and "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard" from The Niagara River by Kay Ryan, Copyright © 2005 by Kay Ryan. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's degree from UCLA.

Ryan has published several collections of poetry, including The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005); Say Uncle (2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), which was a finalist for both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Strangely Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983).

About her work, J. D. McClatchy has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost."

Ryan's awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.

Ryan's poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. In 2008, Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in California.

Hear and see her at https://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20269