#kay ryan

[apocryphics]

[apoemaday]

Losses

by Kay Ryan

Most losses add something — a new socket or silence, a gap in a personal archipelago of islands.

We have that difference to visit — itself a going-on of sorts.

But there are other losses so far beyond report that they leave holes in holes only

like the ends of the long and lonely lives of castaways thought dead but not.

[havingapoemwithyou]

winter fear by Kay Ryan

[kitchen-light]

[Writing is] a way of thinking unlike any other. Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. Thinking takes place in language, and it’s hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinking is creating the language. If I don’t write poetry, in the profoundest way I have no way to think.

Kay Ryan, The Art of Poetry No. 94, Interviewed by Sarah Fay, Issue 187, Winter 2008

[whisperthatruns]

We're Building the Ship as We Sail It

The first fear being drowning, the ship's first shape was a raft, which was hard to unflatten after that didn't happen. It's awkward to have to do one's planning in extremis in the early years--- so hard to hide later: sleekening the hull, making things more gracious.

Kay Ryan (Poetry, June 2006)

[typewriter-worries]

Tenderness and Rot, Kay Ryan

[foolishxprincipalitee]

– Anthony J. Crowley

ok, no, but I read this poem by Kay Ryan (b. 1945, the first openly lesbian United States Poet Laureate <3) and immediately thought CROWLEYCORE

[contremineur]

Each escape involved some art, some hokum, and at least a brief incomprehensible exchange between the man and metal during which the chains were not so much broken as he and they blended. At the end of each such mix he had to extract himself. It was the hardest part to get right routinely: breaking back into the same Houdini.

Kay Ryan, Houdini

from here – thank you, poem-locker (magicked away since December 2015)

Harry Houdini by New York's East River (1912)

[agirlnamedbone]

Kay Ryan (Say Uncle, 1991)

[thelastofthebookworms]

This was supposed to be a French poetry poll. I'll make one, I promise, but I was distracted by the ladies (I think I'll make at least a Amy Lowell's poll and a Renee Vivien one too later, also under my 'sapphic poetry' tag)

They may not be the ones you would have picked yourself, they're some personal favorites.

Feel free to share yours, though !

Anne Hathaway

XVI (Twenty-one love poems)

Fireworks

One Art

Lighthouse Keeping

The Love of Judas

Wild Geese

For the Goddess Too Well Known

Blest as the Immortal Gods

[dk-thrive]

We turn out as tippy as eggs. Legs are an illusion. We are held as in a carton if someone loves us. It's a pity only loss proves this.

— Kay Ryan, "Eggs" in "Erratic Facts" (Grove Press, 2015) (via Read a Little Poetry)

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"Seas pleat winds keen fogs deepen..."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

[poem-today]

A poem by Kay Ryan

The Best of It

However carved up or pared down we get, we keep on making the best of it as though it doesn’t matter that our acre’s down to a square foot. As though our garden could be one bean and we’d rejoice if it flourishes, as though one bean could nourish us.

Kay Ryan

[havingapoemwithyou]

spiderweb by Kay Ryan

[kitchen-light]

INTERVIEWER When you rode your bicycle across the country you discovered you were meant to become a writer, but what are the practical ways you taught yourself to write? RYAN I’d kept a journal of that trip and decided that I would get up every day and transcribe that journal, augment it and fix it up. What that gave me was the habit. But once that was done I didn’t know what I was going to do. I’d bought a tarot deck—this was the seventies—a standard one with a little accompanying book that explained how to read the cards, lay them out, shuffle them—all those things. But I’m not a student and was totally impatient with learning anything about the cards. I thought they were just interesting to look at. But I did use the book’s shuffling method, which was very elaborate, and in the morning I’d turn one card over and whatever that card was I would write a poem about it. The card might be Love, or it might be Death. My game, or project, was to write as many poems as there were cards in the deck. But since I couldn’t control which cards came up, I’d write some over and over again and some I’d never see. That gave me range. I always understood that to write poetry was to be totally exposed. But in the seventies I only had models of ripping off your clothes, and I couldn’t do that. My brain could be naked, but I didn’t want to be naked. Nor was I interested in the heart, or love. The tarot helped me see that I could write about anything—even love if required—and retain the illusion of not being exposed. If one is writing well, one is totally exposed. But at the same time, one has to feel thoroughly masked or protected.

Kay Ryan, The Art of Poetry No. 94, Interviewed by Sarah Fay, Issue 187, Winter 2008

[noncompliantcyborg]

To the young anglerfish

Kay Ryan

For now and for the next 400-plus generations, the hornlike symptom on your brow will itch and be subject to irritation. At that point it will begin to resemble a modification useful for tricking food. It will at last begin to begin to do some good. Meanwhile, the problems of life enhance: an awkwardness attends the mating dance and an inexplicable thoughtfulness at the wrong moments. That part of you that is pledged to the future abstracts you in some way from nature with the small n. You feel a comical, budding power, and then you don't again.

from Elephant Rocks, Grove Press, 1996.