newjerseynewsroom.com

BY ADAM PHILLIPS

VOA NEWS

NEW YORK CITY — For the past year, Kay Ryan has been serving as America's 16th poet laureate, tapped by the librarian of Congress to be ambassador for American poetry. She has published more than half a dozen books of collected poems. She is well-known for her compact, vivid and accessible verse.

The august marble-and-gilt halls of the Library of Congress, where Ryan has her official headquarters, seem an unlikely place for someone raised in what she calls the "glamour-free, ocean-free, hot, stinky, oil-rich, potato-rich" San Joaquin Valley of California. But then, growing up, Ryan didn't want to be poet.

"It [to declare oneself a poet] seemed like putting on airs," she says. "It seemed self-absorbed. It seemed like something that my oil well driller father wouldn't understand at all and that my mother would disapprove of, because it was just showing off."

Imagination, rigor define Ryan's work

Born in 1945, Ryan came of age during the 1960s and '70s, when highly personal, often soul-baring poetry was in vogue. That was definitely not her style.

"I liked much, much chillier, more controlled and thoughtful and witty and — for lack of a better term — 'intelligent' poetry, more than physical, expressive, confessional work," she says.

Still, Ryan says she found that poetry was nonetheless "possessing her mind." If she was reading prose, for example, "the prose would start rhyming, and it was kind of a little insanity taking me over," she recalls.

Ryan has a fluid, soaring imagination that couples — sometimes smoothly, often wildly — with the compact rigor she brings to her craft. Both qualities are evident in her poem "Killing Time":

Time is rubbery.

If you hide it

in the shrubbery

it will wait

till winter and

wash back out

with the rainwater.

You will find it

on your steps again

like the newspaper.

Time compresses.

Stuff it in the

couch corner and

it will spring out

some night or other

when you have guests.

One of whom guesses.

Time stretches.

Then it snaps back

leaving bare patches

that didn't happen.

Abandoned time hardens

like hidden gum.

People feel around.

Sooner or later

it will be found.

Discovering her calling

It was not until 1976, when Ryan was 30, that she realized that poetry was her true calling. She had just come over the Hoosier Pass in the Rocky Mountains on a cross-country bicycle trip when she found herself in an altered state of awareness.

"I experienced some atomic alteration in my mind," she says, "... and I realized I had this incredible capacity to think like a laser, and I could think out to infinity. At first I was doing a few little 'kite tricks' with it. But then I realized, 'Oh, this is the perfect chance to get the answer to my question: Shall I be a writer?'"

But the "answer" she got was a question.

"And the question was, 'Do you like it?' That was the entire answer. And I just laughed because there was no question about it. I loved it! So I really went down the mountain knowing what I was going to do with the rest of my life."

Exploring the everyday

Such epiphanies notwithstanding, Ryan's poems often explore everyday human emotions such as hope, doubt and fear. In this poem, Ryan expresses a special fondness for relief. She observes that relief is a fleeting emotion which, unlike love, is always "paid for" in advance:

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.

There is a dreamy

wading feeling to your walk

inside the current

of restored riches,

clocks set back,

disasters averted.

To date, Ryan has published more than a half-dozen collections of poetry, beginning with her self-published volume Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, in 1983. But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that she began to acquire a national reputation.