When she reads her poetry in public, Kay Ryan does something unusual: she reads poems, at least some poems, twice. Few poets write poems short enough to permit that repetition, or interesting enough to reward it, but Ryan’s invite (and demand) rereading: they are that intricate and quick. They are built like jokes that create a pause after the punch line (wait, is that all there is?) before we start to laugh, ask to hear the joke again, and ask for another.
Critics compare her poems to those of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson—Frost because of their moral seriousness and playful skepticism, and Dickinson because of their small-scale lyric intensity, the power the poems gain from compactness. They unfold as brief trials or “essays” (in the etymological sense of the word) in which the poet tests an idea, explores the implications of a pun or image, takes a figure of speech literally, or activates the figurative suggestions latent in a phrase we are used to taking literally, in order to see what knowledge that starting place—often declared in the title—might yield about the world and how we live in it.
Ryan’s poems have a consistent look and feel. They tend to happen in the space of 20 lines or fewer, and those lines are very short, seldom more than three words per line, as if they had been composed in a tiny hand on the fortunes of Chinese fortune cookies or typed on strands of ribbon. Their language is plain but crowded with internal rhymes that create complex networks of sound, and the syntax is compressed, making those short lines extremely dense. This combination of simplicity and complexity is part of the poetry’s off-center, idiosyncratic approach to the commonplace. The mind at work in them is both familiar and eccentric. There is no “I” in them—Ryan is concerned with what “we” do and how “we” think and speak, or what “you” see and feel. If her perspective is impersonal, it is also quirky and individual.
Ryan is a Californian. She grew up in small towns in the Mojave Desert and San Joaquin Valley, and she has taught basic English skills at the College of Marin since 1971. She makes a point, she says, of living “very quietly.” Nonetheless, awards committees have sought her out (her body of work won the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize), and she is a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. The Niagara River, her sixth and most recent book of poetry, was published in 2005.
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Ryan’s poems reflect back on their own activity in ways that make the poem itself a model of the experience or idea it investigates. Take “It Cannot Be Said for Certain.” Here Ryan wonders whether the patterns we discover in experience are imposed (“self-flattering”). If not, then those patterns of meaningfulness are like a fork—an ordinary object, but a strange one to bring forward in a metaphysical argument like this one. How did she get there?
The poem’s logic goes something like this. The frisson of recognition we feel when experience discloses a pattern gives us a “shiver.” That word suggests to Ryan its neighbor “silver,” which, put together with “shiver,” neatly describes the kind of light spine tingle she means. These words together give concreteness to the feeling: it is almost something definite and objective. The feeling occurs periodically, regularly enough for the poet to hold it up as proof against the vacancy and randomness that she experiences when there is no “silver shiver” of coherence. Doing this mentally, she decides, is like holding up . . . a fork. What is a fork exactly? It consists of those tines and the spaces between them, those absences being “the necessary black.” Even the random dark, Ryan reasons, is part of a necessary design.
Ryan develops this idea through a series of associations in which the sound of words is prominent. The key word “pattern” suggests “self-flattery” and “matter” (not true rhymes, but close); the “velvet dark” turns into the “silver shiver,” and the “v” returns in “vacancies.” As in other Ryan poems, sound seems essential to this poem’s way of making meaning—while sound is also resistantly arbitrary here, not reducible to sense. But Ryan is redefining the random as necessary. Prepared by the end of the poem to trust not only the “silver shiver” of epiphany but also those gaps “between the tines,” we can reread the poem, paying attention to the potential for meaning in seemingly random wordplay—and in everything else that happens between the lines.
Yes! We can bet that Ryan wants us to hear the cliché between (or behind) her final line, an old saw which she has ingenuously warped and sharpened, giving it back some bite. Every Ryan poem involves some pleasingly confounding confluence of sound and sense, thought and feeling, life and art. To get that silver feeling, we need to read between the tines.
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To read poems by Kay Ryan, click here.
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