America’s Poet Laureate –who writes about the Niagara River –is a woman who is searching for balance between her very public role and her notoriously private life
Poet laureate Kay Ryan, a river of contradiction
Kay Ryan is a woman built on contradictions. She’s an adventurer who once rode her bicycle clear across the country –and she’s a poet who writes while lying in bed.
She’s an award-winning wordsmith who’s won praise from some of the nation’s top critics –and she’s a part-time instructor who’s logged more than 30 years teaching remedial English at a small community college.
She’s a writer whose poems usually comprise less than 20 lines each –and a woman who can pack more into a few syllables than most people do into whole pages.
And, she’s a woman who’s both very public, in her new role as Poet Laureate of the United States, and notoriously private. (Some have even used a stronger word: reclusive.)
Which might be why, when contacted by The Buffalo News for an interview about her work – which includes a poetry collection titled “The Niagara River” –Ryan responded, politely, with a firm no.
“I am ... swamped,” Ryan wrote The News in response to an interview request. “If I were a boat I’d be full of water even before I went over the falls!”
Maybe that’s not a surprising answer from a woman who’s juggling a major contradiction these days: At a time when she’s approaching retirement, Ryan is also stepping into a very spotlight-saturated role as the official face of poetry in the United States.
She will give her first public reading as the nation’s premiere poet Oct. 16 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
It’s all a big change, especially for someone who spent most of her writing career laboring with no public recognition.
“She’s not a known quantity,” said Michael Kelleher, the artistic director at Just Buffalo Literary Center. “She kind of came out of nowhere [as poet laureate].
“She’s the Sarah Palin of poetry right now.”
Ryan, a California native born in 1945 who began writing poetry in college –and was, in a now-infamous anecdote, once rejected from the undergraduate poetry club at UCLA –has only made strides into any sort of public view as a poet over the past decade, with the publication of a small handful of much-lauded books of brief, elliptical poems.
She has six books of poetry, in all, and some essays in print.
As a writer, Ryan attests that she has never taken a creative writing class; and, even in the small universe of contemporary poetry, she is seen as something of a lone wolf.
Ryan’s own words have fed that mystique. “Once, when I was about 25 and not yet entirely aware of the extremity of my unclubbability,” Ryan wrote in an essay for Poetry magazine, “I did try to go to a writers conference. Thirty minutes into the keynote address I had a migraine. It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative efforts of all sorts.”
She continued in this vein: “I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught.”
Even so, Ryan rose to national prominence –albeit of a narrowly focused sort –by winning a handful of prestigious awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation and a Guggenheim fellowship, both in 2004.
Her list of admirers has always leaned rather to the short side. But, they have always been ardent.
Notable names numbered among her fans include Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Arts Endowment, which awarded Ryan a fellowship in 2001.
In an assessment of Ryan’s work on his critical blog, Gioia wrote that he discovered the Marin Countybased writer in 1994 after her book called “Flamingo Watching” came out from a small press.
“I was immediately struck by the unusual compression and density of Ryan’s work,” wrote Gioia. “I particularly enjoyed the evident delight she took in playing extravagant games with small units of language. Genuine wit is rare in contemporary poetry but rarer still combined with brevity.”
Reading Ryan, Gioia added, challenges audiences in new ways.
“One can read most new poets quite easily,” he wrote. “But a genuinely original poet requires some recalibration of our ear and eye – both inner and outer. Ryan’s work may not seem difficult, but it is.”
To take an example, in her poem “The Niagara River” –the only one in the similarly titled 2005 collection to explicitly take its subject matter from the Niagara Frontier – Ryan writes of traveling on a boat down the Niagara River, watching the scenery slip by.
Then Ryan inserts a twist –funny, sad, ironic, readers can judge for themselves –at the end of the 18-line poem, when she ruminates on where the river ends, at Niagara Falls:
“We/ do know, we do/ know this is the/ Niagara River, but/ it is hard to remember/what that means.”
Not everyone in the poetry world is a fan of Ryan’s style.
Some quibbled with her selection as poet laureate, given the fact that her work can be interpreted as somewhat traditional, at least in form –although “traditional” in, say, an Emily Dickinson-like way, where brevity stands in for greater things and each short line vaults the reader forward by miles.
Some poets, upon her appointment, complained a bit that she was perhaps not outstanding –or even different –enough to be an American poet laureate in the 21st century.
“[Ryan] represents the 47th consecutive ‘School of Quietude’ poet to hold the position in its 71-year history,” wrote Ron Silliman on his poetry blog, which is widely read in poetry circles.
“But,” added Silliman, himself a published poet, “if Ryan is a cipher to much of the poetry scene even in her own community, the reality is that she’s not a bad writer.”
“The real test of her tenure won’t be whether or not she is worthy of the award,” Silliman concluded. “There are hundreds of poets ... with similar credentials. The test will be what she does with the position.”
The award of Poet Laureate, which is made annually by the Library of Congress, comes with few specific duties outside of planning reading events at the library and delivering a public reading and lecture.
The phrase itself –“poet laureate” –comes from England, where the honor was bestowed much earlier than in the United States; among others, William Wordsworth served as poet laureate in England in 1843. In general terms, a poet who is named “laureate,” or uniquely honored among his or her peers, is chosen as one who is particularly exemplary and talented, or in some way representative of his or her fellow poets.
Today, in the United States, much of the job’s potential is left up to the poets who occupy it.
According to the Library of Congress, in the past poet laureates have included Gwendolyn Brooks, who met with elementary-school children to talk about poetry; Ted Kooser, who created a weekly newspaper column featuring short poems by a variety of American poets; Maxine Kumin, who founded a series of women’s poetry events; Robert Hass, who started a major national conference on nature writing; and Rita Dove, who highlighted the work of young Crow Indian writers.
Before Ryan, the most recent poets to hold the position were Charles Simic, last year, and Donald Hall, in 2006-2007.
