Was William Carlos Williams an influence on how you break your lines?So many people have used little skinny lines that it’s hard to say. 1977. I adored him. It will come to you. Sometimes I have to say, No, I think it’s fine. Did you feel isolated there?At first I felt desperately isolated. Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. It’s a way of thinking unlike any other. Which is not to say I’m talking nothing but sunshine. But of course, poetry has its balms.
My experience is mostly that the will can make prose and it can’t make poetry. No, I hardly know them. She did all those things. It wasn’t so much fretting over people as an inability to tolerate confusion. How do you combat that stranded feeling? This is right.
I’m rather shocked to look back at the way I thought of the prisoners at that time—as people with a lot of experience. You often describe her as a nervous person. In my poem, “Lime Light,” the limelight comes from a bowl of limes.
But the concerns and themes that emerged in our first conversation had only deepened. That took three years. If one is writing well, one is totally exposed. My brain is as quiet as that little cardinal until something trips it.
What that gave me was the habit.But once that was done I didn’t know what I was going to do. By this time he was down in Redondo Beach, working for wages for someone else again. I had a very long apprenticeship.Initially, I had no method for sending work out.
0. I might have to add a little bit or turn two lines around or cut a little bit, change a word, or replace a line. And I value her opinion of it a great deal. It made my mother really unhappy because we didn’t have any money.
On an oil rig there are different jobs. He took his pickup truck and went to this chromium mine, but he just couldn’t make a go of it. That was about it.
This was just before deconstruction really took off, and I was already finding the meta thing extremely tiresome—criticism eating up literature. The card might be Love, or it might be Death. As for reality, I don’t even have any interest in that word.I’ve always been sickened by the whole discussion of natural tone, natural voice. What was the fruit on that tree? Essentially, I read literary essays.
I didn’t know how to make things go faster. The more edges you have the more power you have. Ryan has 10 jobs listed on their profile. He dwells in his art not only on human suffering but especially on what remains to be felt and known in suffering’s wake. He was sitting and eating a carton of ice cream and reading a get-rich-quick book and—you know what’s coming—he dropped over dead.Reading a get-rich-quick book and eating ice cream. My mother listened to everything, and I stood next to her.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I just went where he was. My discipline is interior now.
There was no pressure on us. We’re all having a survival class; you just have to wait. Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000).
In the poem, “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard,” you describe the “ruts where she / went out and back / to get the mail” and the spot “where she used to / stand before the sink” as “a worn-out place.” Did your mother take joy in her domestic responsibilities?No, actually the poem imagines that her life left such marks—and it regrets that they are imaginary. I taught the Schoenfeld brothers. She needed things to be simple and orderly. A poem is an empty suitcase that you can never quit emptying. A poem is the whole world to me when I’m writing it. The sewer and septic thing had gone belly-up as everything always did. This is the third installment in a series at #TeachLivingPoets. She employs what she calls “recombinant rhyme”—hidden rhymes that appear in the middle, rather than at the end of her short lines. Still I couldn’t take end-rhyme seriously, which meant I had to find other ways—I stashed my rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middles—the front of one word would rhyme with the back of another one, or one word might be identical to three words. RYAN, CATHERINE (KAY) (Member of the Catholic Women's League for 50 Years, the King City 39ers and Seniors, she worked for the Catholic Children's Aid …
Poets chasing poets, Dean Young vs. Tony Hoagland, a theory of hats, and more.
I’m sure I was trying to appear cool. Poet Laureate each month during the 2019-2020 school year. “There’s nothing to digress upon,” he says.How, in general terms, do poems come to you?