The Poetry Style of Kay Ryan
Comments by J. Zimmerman

Highlights of Poetry. Index of poetry. How to Write Poetry. Books read. How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Prose poem. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Skaldic verse. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle. Poets: A.E. Housman. Adam Zagajewski. Agha Shahid Ali. Amy Clampitt. Billy Collins. Billy Collins exercise. Snorri's Edda. Carl Dennis. Corey Marks. Franz Wright. Gary Young. The Gawain Poet. J. Zimmerman. J. Zimmerman (haiku). J. Zimmerman (tanka). J.D. McClatchy. Jack Gilbert. Jane Hirshfield. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Kay Ryan. Kay Ryan's style. Kay Ryan The Best Of It: New and Selected Poems. Laureate Poets: Britain; USA. Len Anderson. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Nordic Skalds. Philip Larkin. Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A). Richard Hugo. Robert Bly. Sara Teasdale. Snorri's Edda. Stephen Dunn. Ted Kooser. W.S. Merwin.

Kay Ryan's Stanford reading (2010) from The Best Of It: New and Selected Poems.

Kay Ryan's Time Line.
Books by Kay Ryan:
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010).
The Jam Jar Lifeboat and Other Novelties Exposed (2008).
The Niagara River (2005).
Say Uncle (2000).
Elephant Rocks (1996).
Flamingo Watching (1994).
Strangely Marked Metal (1985).
Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983).

The Best Of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) Kay Ryan's Stanford reading (2010) from The Best Of It: New and Selected Poems.
The Niagara River (2005) One of her two best books as of its publication.
Say Uncle (2000) Her best book, as of its publication in 2000.
Elephant Rocks (1996) This is the transitional book, as she changes from publishing tremendously good work to great work.

Take out your copy of Kay Ryan's Say Uncle (2000) and read the title poem (p. 1), which starts and ends thus:

Every day you say, just one more try. ... why won't you say uncle.

Notice and admire the contents: how "Say Uncle" teeter-totters between on the one hand being an acceptance and a giving up while on the other hand being a celebration of hanging on even in the face of great difficulty. While this poem applies to any difficult decision or relationship, it's also a poem about the difficulty of being a poet or artist.

Notice and admire the form: the brevity (small number of very short lines), the inner rhymes and slant rhymes, the wit, the surprises.

Take out your copy of Kay Ryan's The Niagara River (2005) and read her poem "Houdini" (p. 46):

Each escape involved some art, some hokum, ... It was the hardest part to get right routinely: breaking back into the same Houdini.

These two poems exemplify what I admire about Kay Ryan's mature poetic style:

1. Their content:
   • Her poems subtly and wittily comment on the human condition.
   • They are rooted in emotion rather than autobiography, opening them to wide application, interpretation, and relevance.
   • They work at different levels, engendering both a visceral and an analytic response, providing a full-brain (left and right brains) experience.
   • They provide a full-body experience: the best of her poems give me chills or make me laugh aloud or both.
   • They amazement and delight the reader, being about what amazes and delights the poet.
2. Their form:
   • Compact. A few short lines; often a single stanza.
   • Music of rhythm e.g. 2 stresses per line.
   • Music of rhyme: KR's rhymes (mainly internal and slant) are delicious, surprising, and delightful.
     [Internal rhymes: rhymes within the lines avoid the predictable patterns of end-rhyme. ]
     [Slant rhymes: consonants match and the vowel changes e.g.: "clack" and "bleak" versus "black". Or the vowel matches and a consonant alters. KR enlarges the rhyme gap and sets off fireworks in the poems, such as the gaps in: "routinely -- Houdini" or "hokum -- broken -- breaking" or even the relatively clear "exchange -- chains". ]
   • Use of opposites: e.g. a poem about "Blandure" is implicitly a comment on "Grandure".
   • Use of understatement (litotes).

Again take out your copy of Kay Ryan's Say Uncle (2000) and read her poem "Why We Must Struggle" (p. 54):

If we have not struggled as hard as we can at our strongest how will we sense the shape of our losses or know what sustains us longest ... how loss activates a latent double, how we can feed as upon nectar upon need?

Joseph Parisi (in 100 essential modern poems by women (2008)) writes:

Kay Ryan's witty poems are bracing distillations of her precise observations of the world and the vagaries of humankind. Aside from the shardlike fragments of Sappho or the sharpest of haiku, it is unusual to find such compression of thought and deftness of touch as are typical of her minimalist art ... fine craftsmanship and subtly subversive tendencies.

Dennis Morton, host of the KUSP public radio Poetry Show, in an email exchange (2010) praising KR's work:

It takes genius to pare the redundancies from one's writing, to have that sense of the essential and to resist embellishment. I think it also takes a bit of bravery, as a poet, to say "that's it: it's all there, in that small bundle".

Dana Goia, whose essay reprinted at http://www.danagioia.net/essays/eryan.htm was one of the first to praise her work, writes:

Kay Ryan's magnificently compressed poems shimmer exuberantly not only with joy and intelligence but also with genuine wisdom.

Finally look again at your copy of Kay Ryan's The Niagara River (2005) and read her poem "Tar Babies" (p. 25):

Tar babies are not the children of tar people. It is far worse. The tar baby occurs spontaneously ... When you start to help her is when she starts to stick.

Kay Ryan's poems are likely to last for centuries - at least I hope so. In addition to their worthiness of content and form as noted above, these issues relate to their survival likelihood:

• Few poems of today will last through the sieves of time for 500 years and far fewer for a millennium or two. Every generation is a "Now" generation. Technology changes are lossy. Very little will survive from our times.
• But it's not just the occasional epics (Iliad, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, ...) that survive. It's also (after Parisi) "the shardlike fragments of Sappho or the sharpest of haiku" — the category of KR's best poems.
• We're transitioning from the printing-press age that began in the 15th century with Gutenberg. Possibly moving to video dominance and a rejuvenated oral tradition — and the re-ascension of rhymed poetry.
• The intellectual aspect of KR's poems will be a delight to far-future MFA students puzzling out her meaning in quaint long-ago 21st-century English.

Influences

The Niagara River (2005) One of her two best books as of its publication.
Say Uncle (2000) Her best book, as of its publication in 2000.
Elephant Rocks (1996) This is the transitional book, as she changes from publishing tremendously good work to great work.

In her 15 February 2006 City Arts and Lectures event, Kay Ryan said whose work she prefers to read, which is consistent with my finding a stong resonance of Ryan's work with Larkin's:

I read the noble dead: Donne, Hopkins, Larkin, Housman.

Links and Books.

• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of Britain
• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of the U.S.A.
• Best Poems by the Best Poets - Some Lists of Winners.
• Other Books of Poetry Form.

Related pages: Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms and related topics. How to Write Poetry.

Copyright © 2010-2016 by J. Zimmerman, except for the quoted poems. All poems Copyright © 1985-2015 by Kay Ryan. All rights reserved.

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