Curtis Gale Weeks and NYCTom were just disagreeing about Kay Ryan's poem "Outsider Art," so I thought I'd post this essay of mine on Ryan and her status as outsider poet. Forgive me if I've posted this on these boards in the past.
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Telling it Slant: The Poetry of Kay Ryan
Over the course of four volumes, Kay Ryan has developed a poetic voice as clear and distinctive as the landscapes of California’s San Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert, where she was raised. Growing up in a working class family, far from the centers of American literary culture, Ryan is a true outsider. Unlike so many of her contemporaries who teach creative writing in universities, Ryan has spent her adult life working in the trenches of academe, teaching basic writing at the College of Marin and San Quentin Prison. As her poems attest, however, working outside the literary and academic mainstream has its advantages. During the nine years between the appearance of her first two books (Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, 1983, and Strangely Marked Metal, 1985 ) and her brilliant 1994 collection Flamingo Watching, Ryan developed her own highly distinctive style. The publication of Elephant Rocks in 1996 confirmed her as one of the country's most accomplished and original poets. Each of her two recent books contains more fully-realized poems than the Selected’s of most of her contemporaries.
Though it is always dangerous to speculate on a poet’s origins and development, we might locate one source of Ryan’s distinctive vision in her desert childhood. Dana Gioia, in “Discoverying Kay Ryan,” the first published essay on Ryan’s work, notes the influence of Southern California on her poetry and observes, “Something of Ryan’s harsh and hard-worked native terrain is reflected in her luxuriant minimalist aesthetic.” In "A Certain Meanness of Culture," Ryan describes the Spartan aesthetic enforced by a desert economy.
You can get an appreciation
for why a donkey is
fussy about books
since she has to carry them.
You start to value culture
like you would water. . . .
. . . And when
you dream, it's not romance.
Things are too thin
out here already to chance
sad endings. You get
pretty stringy and impatient
with the fat smoke off
old cities. You get cranky
and admire just what stands up
to the stars' cold and the
sun's fire. You like winches
and pulley's, picks and khakis,
and the rare sweet grass you can
find for your donkey.
Raised in such a bleak and unforgiving environment, Ryan must have learned early how to adapt and survive. Later, when the time came to fashion a poetic style, she acted in the best American tradition and, with the pragmatic efficiency of a pioneer, jury-rigged a poetics to suit her needs. Though echoes of H. D.'s classics-influenced Imagism are audible in her first books, by the time Ryan published Flamingo Watching, she had fully assimilated her influences. The lyrics of her mature style marry the trimeter and tetrameter lines of the English lyric tradition to the more syncopated free verse line of the Pound-Williams-Black Mountain school. Combining occasional end-rhyme and regular meter with free verse, the poet compensates for the increased irregularity of her method by formalizing and enriching the poem’s aural texture with internal rhyme and assonance, to achieve her signature style.
In some poems (such as "Spring" or "When Fishing Fails") Ryan's formalism dominates; in others, free verse prevails. But in her most distinctive poems, the two forms merge to make a music all her own:
No Rest for the Idle
The idle are shackled
to their oars. The waters
of idleness are borderless
of course and must always
be plied. Relief is foreign
on this wide and featureless
ocean. There are no details:
no shores, no tides, no times
when things lift up and then
subside, no sails or smokestacks,
no gravel gathered up and spit back,
no plangencies, no sea birds startled;
the weather, without the Mathew Arnold.
This is formal verse even free verse poets can love; free verse, for which formalists can feel a warm consanguinity. In achieving such a fusion, Ryan has made her work thoroughly modern without employing the usual Modernist and postmodernist strategies. Instead of fragmentation or sterile verbal hijinks, her poems surprise and delight readers with their playfully shifting patterns and densely concentrated meanings. Her verse's occasional difficulty results not from the poet’s disregard for the bourgeois reader, but from her determination to follow Emily Dickinson’s injunction to tell the truth, but tell it “slant.”
Though her poems are loaded with images, Ryan is not an imagist of any modern school; instead, she x-rays her subjects, revealing their secrets designs. Nor does she follow Ezra Pound's injunction to "Go in fear of abstractions," but rather seems to revel in them. Her books’ Tables of Contents are litanies of lofty immensities: "Hope," "Relief," "Doubt," "Force," Intention," "Emptiness," "Age." Yet from these abstractions, Ryan wrings pathos, ironic insights, and heart-felt wisdom.
The poet accomplishes such magic because she is, at heart, not quite of this age. Her poems are suffused with an almost Medieval religious sensibility. Saints, the kabala, virgin births, relics, reliquaries and other religious subjects appear in her lines with surprising frequency. The world in her poems often seems a complex allegorical tapestry, filled with secret emblems and occult correspondences.
Though often writing with a naturalist's eye for details, Ryan is not a conventional nature poet, but, rather, that all-but-extinct species of literary artist, an allegorist. Reading her poems is like unraveling the complex symbolism of Medieval heraldry. Animals in particular often appear less as biological entities than mysterious emblems bearing a wealth of hidden meanings. Here is a little masterpiece called "Turtle" that typifies her approach:
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
she can ill afford the chances she must take
in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
a packing-case places, and almost any slope
defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.
Ryan's unheroic little turtle is, among other things, an emblem of the poet, who must have quietly mastered her art while slogging through years of teaching basic English, “Never imagining some lottery / [would] change her load of pottery to wings.” Well-schooled in humility and patience, Ryan offers lessons in endurance and survival in her verse. Her chief poetic preoccupation is what in earlier times was called simply The Virtues. Unlike her turtle, however, Ryan’s literary excursions are sustained by more than one type of levity; irony, playful wit, and a wry sardonicism lighten the burden of her moral fables.
For all her hermetic religiosity, Ryan is a thoroughly modern writer, her world view shaped by science as much as by her own hard-won experience. As might be expected of one who grew up “living at the wrong edge / of the arable,” where the impersonal mechanisms of nature are most visibly evident, she is a sharp-eyed and unsentimental observer of the natural scene, with a vision permeated by Darwinism. Frequently, both strains of her vision intertwine, as here, in this little two stanza lyric called “The Hinge of Spring,” where straightforward naturalistic description is infused with metaphoric significance:
The jackrabbit is a mild herbivore
grazing the desert floor,
quietly abridging spring,
eating the color off everything
rampant-height or lower.
Rabbits are one of the things
coyotes are for. One quick scream,
a few quick thumps,
and a whole little area
shoots up blue and orange clumps.
In another poem, about a remark by Darwin, Ryan gives her evolutionism a more optimistic slant, suggesting that "Perhaps not chance, / but need, selects; and desperation / works upon giraffes until their necks / can reach the necessary branch."
Constrained by a hard-nosed skepticism, Ryan's faith in the meaningfulness and dignity of life is, like her turtle, well-grounded. Though she believes, like Hopkins, that there lives "a dearest freshness deep down things," her faith and optimism do not depend on transcendental hopes or supernatural aspirations, but are rooted in a thoroughly American pragmatism. Faith and hope are true not because they are underwritten by religious codes or divine revelations, but because, like those winches and pulleys of an earlier poem, they work--physically, morally, and psychologically. In “Doubt,” Ryan shows the inefficacy of pessimism, and, by implication, the practical utility of its opposite:
A chick has just so much time
to chip its way out, just so much
egg energy to apply to the weakest spot
or whatever spot it started at.
It can't afford doubt. Who can?
Doubt uses albumen
at twice the rate of work.
One backward look by any of us
can cost what it cost Orpheus. . . .
Like the neck of her poem's flamingo, Ryan’s idiosyncratic faith is not rigidly orthodox, but "flexible to the point / of oddity." The poet looks at things from odd angles, re-examines old ideas and opinions, refusing to settle into orthodoxy. Irresistibly quotable, Ryan’s poems tease the imagination, yielding richer implications with each reading. Word play and sudden reversals keep readers on their toes. Sometimes compressed to the point of obliquity, her lines make readers work hard to scry their meanings. New tangents often hinge on a single word, as in "Flamingo Watching," where the poet takes a sly jab at fundamentalist stiff-necks who fail to appreciate her emblematic bird’s disconcerting flamboyance:
. . . The natural elect,
they think, would be less pink,
less able to relax their necks,
less flamboyant in general.
They privately expect that it's some
poorly jointed bland grey animal
with mitts for hands
whom God protects.
Written with painstaking exactness, Ryan’s poems are pure distillates of meaning. Perhaps more than any other quality, her near-religious faith in poetry's ability to illuminate experience sets Ryan apart from her contemporaries. Her poems, even at their most flamboyant, are more than brilliant exhibitions of verbal wit; they are fraught with meaning and significance.
Though Ryan tells truth "slant," truth it remains, obdurate as a granite. More even than her idiosyncratic style, her adherence to poetry’s ancient truth-telling function marks Ryan as a literary maverick. For "truth," say our best postmodern doctrines, is a curiously elusive thing, like the "snipe" of our childhood snipe-hunts; the formal mechanisms of language are said to be far too fluid and ephemeral to catch that flamboyantly feathered bird.
Perhaps what enables Ryan to avoid so many of the era’s pitfalls is that her guiding principle is pleasure, not power. Her primary allegiance is to the poem at hand, not fashion, personality, or ideology. Though often suffused with a wily if understated feminism, her poems are too many-minded and self-questioning to espouse ideas single-mindedly. The poet climbs Parnassus alone, without map or guide--a process in which readers become privileged witnesses of a journey of discovery. Though often, like the museum-goers in "Outsider Art,” we are “not / pleased the way we thought / we would be pleased,” we are singularly entertained at every turn of the poet’s sometimes perilous ascent.
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