Kay Ryan at Dodge

Ryan’s talk at Dodge was partly chat and partly Q&A. Her speech was lively and irreverent, playing with language and lecture as it arrived from her. For example, she was talking about how she composes. She doesn’t start with her but by getting energy from something she loves. Her poetry practice is in part to start the day with re-reading essays that exhilarate, such as for her, Joseph Brodsky‘s “Less than One”. To write, her idea is to begin with very little, as little as possible.
On waiting for inspiration: Write when it is time to write, or when there is time to write, not when one wants to. Wanting to write is an impediment, paralyzing with intent. Trust emptiness. As Kundera said our writing has to be better than we are. And thank god — and now I’ve lost my point — and watch out for parenthesis! They’ll get you!
She took stabs at that killer question of where inspiration comes from: Words have a family of metaphors which they suggest, rhymes are suggested to glue the poem together more and cliches are common because they are rich and open wonderfully.
On trying to contain something with a poem: By writing you build a tool not the objective thing. You write to build a net to catch something, living or dead but deep and unseen.
On metaphor: Stevie Smith cooks the material by writing thru a surrogate object and “thoroughly inhabit that object”.
On the typical shape of her poems: I naturally write in short units. If a poem is almost all edges, it is almost all exposed. It slows people down. It allows rhyme and sounds to bounce terrifically.
On your own poems: It’s great to enjoy your own work. It’s fine. Do it. Maybe nobody else ever will so you may as well. 😉
On her path to poetry: Kay Ryan taught remedial English at community college “where we aspired to the paragraph”. Having taught adult basic education for a while, I can relate to the need for plain English and the hurdles to get past the letters to decode meaning. People put their whole bodies into the strain and progress can be, although isn’t always, on the scale of years, not weeks.
I wanted to drive a truck and have a trade. I liked to write funny things that kept me protected. I had a master’s in English but I loathed Byronic dramatic pose of poetry. But language started making spontaneous poem parts when I was about 30 while I was reading. It may have been Proust. It may have been a murder mystery. More likely a murder mystery. But I had my first poetry book at 40 and first New Yorker Poem at 50. It was a long apprenticeship learning from myself. You might have to make your own same mistake for a long time but no one can hurry past that.
On festivals: I’ve been writing since the 70s. “I’ve always avoided festivals, but if I’m corrupted now, so what? What’s left of me now?”
On when you have enough distance to write about something hard: You don’t have to wait until you’re ready to write about something. You have to go off half-cocked. Sometimes we have to speculate beyond what we know. You have to write it now because you can only write anything now: you’ll be someone different tomorrow. She added later, that she doesn’t believe in growth. There are times of more and less access to what you know but all the equipment, all the knowledge was in place by 24 years old. “That’s the good thing about talking longer: you undo everything you’ve already said.”