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Like A Turtle, Top Poet Slow To Gain Recognition

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The Washington Post

Published: July 20, 2008

WASHINGTON - More than a decade and a half ago, despairing that her poems would ever find an audience, Kay Ryan found herself writing one about a turtle. It was about as personal as a Kay Ryan poem ever gets.

Ryan's appointment as the nation's new poet laureate, announced Thursday by Librarian of Congress James Billington, will cap one of the most unusual careers in American letters. Hers is "a very original poetic voice," Billington says, "almost the antithesis of the things you hear booming at you every day."

Yet when she wrote the concluding lines of "Turtle," Ryan evoked a deeply pessimistic vision of her life's work:

"... 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."

Still a bit stunned to have risen so far above luck level, Ryan can't resist joking about her newly exalted status.

"I thought I might take it upon myself to prevent all bad poetry from being published during my reign," she says, speaking by phone from her home north of San Francisco, when asked if there is any special project she plans to undertake in her new role.

Then she tries to explain how a poet laureateship could happen to a 62-year-old woman who grew up in the small towns of central California, got rejected by her college's poetry club, committed to writing poetry as a vocation only after she had turned 30 and lived a deliberately quiet life, not cultivating connections within the literary establishment.

Her father was an oil well driller who died reading a get-rich-quick book when she was 19. Her mother taught elementary school, but you couldn't describe the household as literary. Asked about the origin of her poetic impulse, Ryan talks about learning, as a child, that language "could have a powerful effect on others."

Spitting Out A Funny Story

Take, for example, the time when, alone with a group of adults, she described "my sixth-grade teacher's bottom jiggling as she wrote on the blackboard": "I caused a woman to spit her milk across the table," she recalls.

At UCLA, the poems she submitted were judged not to meet the poetry club's standards. She "leaped away, mortally stung," and afterward "stayed pretty remote from the joining business." Bachelor's and master's degrees in hand, she taught remedial English part time at the College of Marin, a job she kept for decades because it allowed her time to write. She wasn't yet seeing herself as a true poet, however. That changed on a cross-country bike trip in 1976.

She was 30. Poetry, she had started to realize, was possessing her mind. Sentences had started rhyming in her head - "the machine was going without my permission" - and she wasn't happy about it. She understood that writing poetry "means that one is totally exposed. It requires everything of the writer." She wasn't sure she I wanted to be that exposed.

Pedaling up 3,500-foot Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she found herself slipping into a kind of boundary-free mental state. There were "no borders to me, no borders to anything," she explains, and she seized the opportunity to pose the question that had been troubling her:

"Should I be a writer?"

Back came an answering question that made everything clear:

"Do you like it?"

Yes, she did.

Still shying away from difficult themes, Ryan assigned herself a task: She would get out a pack of tarot cards, turn one card over every day and write a poem from it.

"So I had to start dealing with these abstractions like love, death, the wheel of fortune."

It took eight years to get a poem accepted at a serious poetry magazine, 10 more to get into the New Yorker. Ryan says she doesn't know how she could have endured the rejection without Carol Adair, her partner for nearly 30 years. They met when both were teaching classes at San Quentin State Prison.

Career On Slow Track

For years, Ryan's career path "wasn't exactly on the fast track." A book she placed with the respected but tiny Copper Beech Press in 1985 "was met by profound silence." For years, she tried and failed to get picked up by a bigger publishing house. It was Copper Beach that published "Flamingo Watching," the collection that includes "Turtle," in 1994, and Ryan was "profoundly discouraged" to think that nine years of work would once again go unnoticed.

But gradually, "Flamingo Watching" got read, and Ryan has since published three more collections.

Ryan became seriously visible in 2004, when she won both a Guggenheim fellowship and the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. All this, and now the poet laureateship: While the laureate's official duties are minimal, recent holders of the office have tried to boost poetry's standing in the nation's cultural life.

Did she have to think twice about accepting the position, given her lifelong desire to focus more on her writing than on being a public figure?

"I did," Ryan says. "I was afraid of sacrificing the good opinion of Emily Dickinson by being 'public, like a frog.'"

A POEM OF HOPE

The following poem, "Hope," is from "Elephant Rocks," by Kay Ryan (Grove Press, 1997).

What's the use

of something

as unstable

and diffuse as hope -

the almost-twin

of making-do,

the isotope

of going on:

what isn't in

the envelope

just before

it isn't:

the always tabled

righting of the present.

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