kay ryan

I compare Kay Ryan's poems to Faberge eggs -- tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder -- don't think they're merely decorative. With aplomb and wit, Ryan sallies forth against quandaries as immense as the nature of nothingness and as petite as the mechanics of dewdrops rolling off a leaf. A California native, Ryan narrowly avoided obtaining a Ph.D in literary criticism ("I couldn't bear the idea of being a doctor of something I couldn't fix.") and after a brief stint of 1970s idealism teaching at a "free school" ("Those were alternative schools where the children wore -- now, what did they wear? Well, maybe paint, on their faces. No shoes, a Huckleberry Finn sort of school."), she settled into teaching basic writing skills in Northern California's Marin County. "I like it," she says. "It's just as uncomplicated as giving blood." Poetry, however, "is the most complicated thing. It's the most beautiful sport. I am always a student of poetry, and in it I find a rest that I don't find anywhere else, whether writing my own or reading the masters. And by rest I mean not quiescence or stop, but release. What poetry does is put more oxygen into the atmosphere. Poetry makes it easier to breathe." Ryan attributes her penchant for brief poems to "a short attention span. Actually, the way I write is to melt all the materials in my brain at once, like those cyclotrons in which they get atomic matter really hot and get it to do weird things. I have so many things that I like to do at once, that I can't do very long poems. It's hard to sustain. And I seem to be able to say what I want to. I'm very satisfied with short poems." Nothing exists as a block and cannot be parceled up. So if nothing's ventured it's not just talk; it's the big wager. Don't you wonder how people think the banks of space and time don't matter? How they'll drain the big tanks down to slime and salamanders and want thanks? Kay Ryan's most recent book of poems, "Elephant Rocks," is published by Grove Press. photograph by Sydney Goldstein