| Show New poet laureate built a career far from the literary mainstream Bob Thompson The Wa Washington ashington hington Post More than a decade and anda a half ago despairing that her poems would ever find findan an audience Kay Ryan found herself writing one about a turtle It was about as personal as a Kay Ryan poem ever gets Ryans Ryan's appointment as the nations nation's new poet laureate announced Thursday by Librarian of Congress James Billington will cap one of the most unusual careers in American letters Hers is a avery avery avery very original poetic voice Billington says almost the antithesis of the things you hear booming at you every day Yet when she wrote the concluding lines of Turtle Ryan evoked a deeply pessimistic vision of her lifes life's work She lives Below luck level never imagining some lottery Will change her load of pottery to wings Her only levity is patience The sport of truly chastened things Still a bit stunned to have risen so far above luck level Ryan cant can't resist joking about her newly exalted status I thought I might take it upon myself to prevent all bad poetry from being published during my reign she says speaking by phone from her home north of San Francisco when asked if there is any special project she plans to undertake in her new role Then she tries to explain how a poet laureateship could happen to a year 62 old woman who grew up in the small towns of central California the glamour-free glamour zone got rejected by her colleges college's poetry club committed to writing poetry as a vocation only after shed she'd turned 30 and lived a deliberately quiet life not cultivating connections within the literary establishment Her father was an oil well driller who died reading a rich quick book when she was 19 Her mother taught elementary school but you couldn't describe the household as literary Asked about the origin of her poetic impulse Ryan talks about learning as a achild achild achild child that language could have a ital powerful end ital effect on others Take for example the time when alone with witha a group of adults she described my sixth- sixth grade teachers teacher's bottom jiggling as she wrote on the blackboard I caused a woman to spit spither spither spither her milk across the table she recalls At UCLA the poems she submitted were judged not notto notto notto to meet the poetry clubs club's standards She leaped away mortally stung and afterward stayed pretty remote from the joining business Bachelors Bachelor's and masters master's degrees degrees' in hand she taught remedial English part time at the College of Marin Mann a job she kept for decades because it allowed her time to write Sh She wasn't yet seeing herself as asa asa asa a true poet however That changed on a cross cross- country bike trip in 1976 She was 30 Poetry she had started to realize was possessing her mind Sentences had started rhyming in her head the machine was going without my permission and she wasn't happy about it She understood that writing poetry means that one is totally exposed It requires everything of the writer She wasn't sure she wanted to be that exposed Pedaling up foot Hoosier Pass in the Colorado she found herself slipping into a kind of free boundary-free mental state There were no borders to tome tome tome me no borders to anything she explains and she sc seized zed the opportunity to pose the question that had been troubling her Should I be a writer Back came an answering question that made everything clear Do you like it Yes she did Still shying away from difficult themes Ryan assigned herself a task She would get out a pack of tarot cards turn one card over every day and write a poem from it So I had to start dealing with these abstractions like love death the wheel of fortune It took eight years to get a poem accepted at a serious poetry magazine 10 more to get into the New Yorker Ryan says she doesn't know how she could have endured the rejection without Carol Adair her partner for nearly 30 years They met when both were teaching classes at San Quentin State Prison In 2004 during the brief period when San Francisco was issuing marriage licenses to same- same sex couples they married at San Francisco City Hall We Ve did it again last week Ryan says its legal statewide this time on the same day coincidentally that she found out about the laureateship For years Ryans Ryan's career path exactly on the fast track A book Ryan placed with the respected but tiny Copper Beech Press in 1985 was vas met by profound silence For years she tried and failed to get picked up by a bigger publishing house It was Copper Beach that published Flamingo Watching the collection that includes Turtle in 1994 and Ryan was profoundly discouraged to think that nine years of work would once again go unnoticed But gradually Flamingo Watching got read and andRyan andRyan andRyan Ryan has since published three more collections with Grove Press One who discovered her was the poet and critic Dana Gioia now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts In a 1998 essay in the Dark Horse literary magazine Gioia noted the unusual compression and density of Ryans Ryan's work Like Emily Dickinson Gioia wrote Ryan has found a way of exploring ideas without losing either the musical impulse or imaginative intensity necessary to lyric poetry Today Gioia calls Ryan F 4 V Photo courtesy of Kay Ryan 62 is the nations nation's new poet laureate simply one of the finest poets writing in America adding that she has the gift of being simultaneously very funny and very wise As for the shortness of her lines Ryan says I like a lot of exposure A word on either end of a aline aline aline line has exposure I like the danger of that She also loves to bury rhyme rather than stick to end rhymes and notes that short lines cause the rhyme to bounce around She tries to achieve the quality of lightness aiming for substance that evaporates poetry not as asa asa asa a burden but as something rising entering the air I want it to make us feel like were we're taking in more oxygen when we breathe Ryan became seriously visible in 2004 when she won both a Guggenheim fellowship and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize All this and now the poet laureateship While the laureates laureate's official duties are minimal recent holders of the office have tried to boost poetry's standing in inthe inthe inthe the nations nation's cultural life Did she have to think twice about accepting the position she is asked given her lifelong desire to focus more on her writing than on being a public figure in the poetry world I did Ryan says I Iwas Iwas I was afraid of sacrificing the good opinion of Emily Dickinson by being public like a frog |
