By DONNA URSCHEL
U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan delivered her final reading of the 2008–2009 poetry season in a performance that was uplifting, abounding in humor and filled with tender insights into the human condition.
As the audience arrived in the Coolidge Auditorium on May 7 and settled into their seats, they heard audio recordings of past poets in the national office of Consultants in Poetry—voices of Leonie Adams, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost and Robert Hayden reading their own poems. The Coolidge, built in 1925, was the original home of the Library’s literary-season readings.
“It’s an honor to be here, to be at the Library of Congress in the Coolidge Auditorium, where so many of my betters have read,” said Ryan. “I always think if you could take a plug out of the wood and you could play it, what wonderful voices you would hear—if you could play the wood somehow.”
Ryan said she was daunted by the recordings of the great poets being broadcast again in the Coolidge. “Neat idea, right? A little hard on me,” she joked, “but nice for you.”
Ryan continued, “When a poet dies, I think it’s a good career move. There’s something sobering about hearing the wonderful dead. They become more pointed. You think, ‘Oh, they really meant it, they really meant it.’”
She launched the evening with a reading of “Chemistry,” a short poem about what happens to words when somebody dies.
Words especially
are subject to
the chemistry
of death: it is
an acid bath
which dissolves
or doubles
their strength.
Sentiments
which pleased
drift down
as sediment;
iron trees
grow from filament.
Ryan read 27 poems, many from her book “Elephant Rocks,” several from her recently released chapbook “The Jam Jar Lifeboat” and four new poems. She often read her poems twice. “I’m a person who really understands things better through reading. When I hear something, it just goes right past me. So I’m in the habit of reading some poems twice,” she explained. “Thank God I’m not Milton,” she added, “or this would be the last reading of the year, not just the season.”
Ryan also discussed her style of writing. “If there’s a quality that I admire, I think it is lightness. I don’t mean lightness at the expense of gravity or substance. But the idea of making things float, of not wearing and oppressing us more than we’re already worn and oppressed. A poem on any subject should leave us freer, leave our atoms a little farther from where they started,” she said.
After this explanation, she read “Dew,” which she described as a poem “inveighing against the evils of combination.”
As neatly as peas
in their green canoe,
as discretely as beads
strung in a row,
sit drops of dew
along a blade of grass.
But unattached and
subject to their weight,
they slip if they accumulate.
Down the green tongue
out of the morning sun
into the general damp,
they’re gone.
Another poem that Ryan read was “New Clothes.” She said, “I’ve been offered a lot of new clothes, metaphorically, the last year or two. This is a cautionary poem. I wrote this poem about 15 years ago, long before I needed it. It’s possible to know things before you need them. In fact, I think it’s essential to know things before you need them. Because when you need them, you can never, ever work it out.” An excerpt:
… You will cast aside
something you cherish
when the tailors whisper,
“Only you could wear this.”
For another poem, Ryan said a friend had given her a book of folk art. Ryan fully expected to like the book, but was surprised when she didn’t, because the people depicted in the images looked angry and the art overall appeared grim. She wrote a poem about her reaction and called it “Folk Art.” The poem never sold. She renamed it “Outsider Art” and the poem was “snapped up instantly.” Ryan said, “Marketing. It was all in the marketing.”
Ryan also read her poem “Relief.” She said, “This is an emotion that I think ought to be installed among the great emotions, like love, anger and sorrow. I don’t know anything much better than relief. That’s sad, isn’t it?” An excerpt:
We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purge, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth —
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth …
Ryan enjoyed telling the audience about her penchant for “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” She explained, “For many years, I used ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ for an inspirational text. I had an old copy from the ‘30s. It had the rough charcoal drawings that were just wonderful. I would open the book at random, when I wanted something to write about.
“That was my rule. I had to open at random. I wrote scores of these Ripley poems.”
Most of Ryan’s Ripley poems start with an epigraph from the “Ripley’s” book. For the poem “Chang,” the epigraph says, “Chinese giant wrote his name on the wall eleven feet above the door.” An excerpt from Ryan’s poem “Chang”:
Again and again
he wrote the
character for his name
high on walls,
well over door frames,
until no shop or temple
but said Chang, Chang!
Far above eye level …
… And Chang did not admire
what he did. His brush work
was rather bad. Chang,
Chang, Chang, Chang, he wrote,
more bored than defiant,
hoping only to be
laughed at by a later giant.
“I want to tell you one of the things that always bothered me about Ripley,” said Ryan. “I’m attracted and repelled and I think most people are. Ripley loved the grotesque and the extreme and the freakish and the weird and the tormented and the lost. I like the calm and the ordinary, and I like to undo Ripley. I found I didn’t know that for the first hundred or two poems. It gradually dawned on me that I like to de-sensationalize everything, including Ripley.”
Another Ripley poem that Ryan read was “The Walking Stick Insect.” The epigraph says “The walking stick insect of South America often loses an antenna or leg—but always grows a new appendage. Often nature makes a mistake and a new antenna grows where the leg was lost.” The poem:
Eventually the
most accident-prone
or war-weary
walking sticks
are entirely
reduced to antennae
with which they
pick their way
sensitively,
appalled by
everything’s
intensity.
All the poems in Ryan’s recently released chapbook, “The Jam Jar Lifeboat,” are inspired by “Ripley’s.” The poetry book is illustrated with colorful drawings by Carl Dern.
Ryan concluded the evening by reading four new poems: “Ledge,” “Train Track Figure,” “Virga” and “Easter Island.” Her reading was taped for webcast on the Library’s website at www.loc.gov/webcasts/.
Donna Urschel is a public affairs specialist in the Library’s Public Affairs Office.