Kay Ryan
is a lion-
ess
of wiliness
These notes were written for the book club, Finding Poetry, which I run with Griffin Books, Penarth. The second book I recommended was ‘Odd Blocks’ by Kay Ryan. This is a Selected published by Carcanet. I enjoy Ryan so much that I have all her USA- published collections. ‘Dew’ comes from the collection ‘Elephant Rocks’, and can be read on the (excellent) Writers Alamnac website, here:
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2005%252F09%252F27.html
‘As neatly as peas in their green canoe, as discretely as beads strung in a row, sit drops of dew along a blade of grass.’
This is the first of three sentences in the poem. Noting its properties, we learn quite a bit about Ryan’s characteristic techniques and attitudes.
* A lot of words rhyme or part-rhyme: neatly-discretely; canoe-row-dew; strung-along (the idiom formed by that last pair is not irrelevant to the poem’s theme). Ryan calls her approach to rhyme “recombinant”, but it doesn’t seem to me as unusual as she or many her critics make out. What it does, I think, here and elsewhere, is glue the poem together, make it seem more whole and discrete (like a drop of dew). It makes leaps of thought seem connected and, if not inevitable, at least suggested.
* The syntax is not straightforward, it’s rather inventive, perhaps in service of the rhyme, or of the tone. As matter of fact it uses that infamous device, the fronted adverbial – times two – though I have little doubt that Ryan, whose professional career was teaching remedial English in a community college, would dislike an approach to education that insists children learn such names.
* The sentence is broken into SIX lines. Ryan says, surely with her tongue partly in her cheek, that the starts and ends of lines are the most potent parts, and short lines give you more of them. More ‘edge’, literally and metaphorically.
* It’s figurative. You might say it mixes its metaphors, the peas (and the canoe) and the beads. But I think that once we’ve taken in the whole poem, the consistent thrust of these figures becomes apparent.
The whole poem is very brief – 13 lines (one less than a sonnet), 65 syllables (one less than half a sonnet). It’s not about the poet, there’s no lyric I in the poem, though it turns out to speak to the poet’s values, I think. Rather, it expresses an observation, and a natural cause-and-effect relation, perhaps a warning. We’re in the realm of epigram and aphorism— or, more accurately I think, of proverb, though the poem’s fresher and less earnest than ‘proverb’ seems to imply. I’d like to say that it’s an ‘exploded proverb’.
Like a proverb, this poem uses a metaphor to express a general wisdom. Like, ‘A stitch in time/ saves nine’, or ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ (this latter a meaning-neighbour of ‘Dew’) but exploded to incorporate more image and detail, and sub-metaphors that serve the whole. And, critically, something in this process makes the ‘proverb’ become subversive and sly: many of her poems are funny peculiar and sometimes funny ha ha, or at least funny smile. I think of Ryan as a champion of the wry smile rather than the belly laugh.
Alongside proverbs, the poetry touchstones here, the ones most mentioned by critics, are Emily Dickinson (brevity, abstraction), some of Robert Frost’s short poems (e.g. ‘Design’, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, ‘Dust of Snow’), Marianne Moore (oddness-of-descriptions, short lines) and Stevie Smith (willingness to be ‘silly’, lightness).
I would add to this list Samuel Menashe, who I think is closer, at least formally. Here is a complete poem of Menashe’s:
A pot poured out
fulfils its spout
It’s not completely clear what the intended force of Dew’s wisdom is, but I read it as very much in line with Ryan’s approach to poetry and her attitudes to PoBiz.
I’d say the poem celebrates ‘discretely’ and warns against ‘accumulate’. The drops that stay small and independent of the other drops are the ones that survive. Better to stand alone, and to not worry about status or belonging, even as you contribute to a greater enterprise — like canoeists in a canoe, or beads on a necklace — two anthropological metaphors that put me in mind of Pacific Islanders, and signal from the very start the implicit human concerns of the poem.
This message is attuned to Ryan’s self-proclaimed ‘outsider’ status and its contradictions. (I’ve learned about these attitudes from published interviews (e.g. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5889/the-art-of-poetry-no-94-kay-ryan) and from her excellent collection of essays, ‘ Synthesizing Gravity’). Ryan seems very much her own person and writes primarily for herself (‘There is nothing so freeing as someone pleasing herself’, she says in praising a poem by Stevie Smith), yet she accepted the position of Poet Laureate of the USA, of which she said it was like being rewarded for staying in all day in your pyjamas.
Stephen Payne 