Kay Ryan, the 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, likes to say that she’s “always advocating for less”—such as less excitement, less limelight, less heartache. She opened the literary season at the Library of Congress with a reading of 29 compact yet exquisite poems that conveyed her wisdom, humor and pursuit of “less.”
Friendly and wryly funny, Ryan spoke to a standing room-only audience of 300-plus in the Mumford Room on the evening of Oct. 16. Many of the poems she read came from her books “Say Uncle” or “The Niagara River.” She also read a few poems that will appear in an upcoming poetry volume.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington introduced Ryan as “a wonderful, American original,” whose poems combine brevity with depth. He told the audience that Ryan likes her poetry to “leave you freer and not more burdened—to provide you with more oxygen in the air.”
Ryan immediately won over the crowd. “I find myself extremely content with all things happening here.” She thanked the many who showed up to hear her read. “I’m used to walking into a half-full place. This laureate-thing does the trick.”
Ryan, who was appointed to the position in August for the 2008-2009 term (see Information Bulletin, September 2008), was born in 1945 in San Jose, Calif., and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Her father was an oil well driller and sometime-prospector. She received both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County.
Ryan launched into her first poem, “Matrigupta,” which was inspired by “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” She said the book, for a long time, has been a source of inspiration. “Ripley likes the sensational. I like the de-sensational.” In “Ripley’s,” Ryan read how long-ago poet Matrigupta had written a poem that so pleased Rajah Vicrama Ditya that he was given the entire state of Kashmir. The poet ruled Kashmir for five years (118-123), and then abdicated to become a recluse.
“This is a poem about ‘less, please’ and the dangers of rewards,” said Ryan. Earlier, at the National Book Festival on Sept. 27, Ryan said the poem “comments directly on my situation.”
Matrigupta
(What a Trojan horse)
thought Matrigupta,
rewarded for his verse
by Rajah Ditya
with one of the nicest
states in India.
(Why couldn’t it
have been a gold watch
or an inscribed plate?
I’ll never write again
at this rate.)
“I am too blessed,”
went the little thank-you
poem he had rehearsed,
but already his words
were getting reversed
and he said, “I am
blue tressed,” which was
only the first indication
of how things were in Kashmir
before his abdication.
Ryan then read another poem about seeking less, titled “Blandeur.” She called it “one of my classic less poems” and “a little prayer.”
Blandeur
If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
The Grand Canyon
…
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
From these parts
In her third poem, “Composition,” Ryan said she was reacting to a quote from the former Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky. “Language is a diluted aspect of matter,” Brodsky once said. Ryan, who is seduced by the texture and power of words, disagrees. “He went pretty far, but not far enough … This poem is for Brodsky. This is what we Poet Laureates do, we write to each other.”
Composition
No. Not diluted.
Flaked; wafered;
but not watered.
…
a vast heraldic shield
of beautiful readable
fragments revealed
as Earth delaminates:
how the metals scatter,
how matter turns
animate.
Ryan went on to read 26 more poems, each one a perfectly cut and polished gem. She read “Patience,” describing the trait as something she had to learn. “As a poet, one acquires a lot more patience than one is supposed to have. Poetry is not a speedy path to glory.” She also read “The Fabric of Life,” and said it was “something else I didn’t want to learn about.” In the poem she describes how there are “… hurts working far past/ the locus of rupture,/ attacking threads far beyond anything/ we would have said/ connects.”
About 10 poems into the reading, Ryan announced, “Now onto Christmas.” When the audience laughed at her abrupt segue, Ryan said, “That’s the terrible thing about poetry readings. You go from one poem to another. Each poem is its own little world, and it’s hard to move on.” Her Christmas poem, “The Excluded Animals,” is about the animals that don’t get into the Nativity scene. Ryan called it a “pantheistic cheer.”
Ryan also read “Home to Roost,” in which the first few lines say “The chickens are circling and blotting out the day …” Ryan explained to the audience, “I had that poem on an editor’s desk on Sept. 11. I had to take it back, because all of a sudden the chickens could be interpreted as airplanes, and the poem took on added significance. I just hate added significance.”
Toward the end of the reading, Ryan included a poem about her mother titled “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard,” one of her few poems about a person. Ryan said most of the time she finds writing about specific people to be “too sticky to handle.” She prefers “cool” material.
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 …
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.
The reading was followed by a book signing and a reception, attended by most of the audience members, who stayed around to meet the master. Though Ryan prefers a quiet life of “less,” the evening didn’t comply. It appears she didn’t mind.
