Kay Ryan confessed that half of her wanted to be a stand-up comedian and amazingly, for a literary poetry reading,(as opposed to a poetry slam) laughter did keep bubbling up from her audience in Edinburgh last Wednesday. The New York Times described her poems as like a cocktail, delicious but with a bite:
'You can’t help consuming Kay Ryan’s poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back – what was that? – and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you.'
The Scottish Poetry Library, where elite readings usually take place, was far too small for the audience expected and so the SPL had combined with the Storytelling Centre to put it on in their lovely, new wood-panelled theatre (inside the 17th c John Knox building). Word must have got around. Almost every poet of note, would-be poets and poetry lovers throughout Scotland were there. THE poetry event of the year, I'd say.
Pulitzer-winning, a recipient of a 'Genius' Fellowship (the MacArthur) and former poet laureate in America no less, Kay Ryan says that she hates readings where everyone sits there all silent and sensitive but instead she likes to hear laughter to know if she has connected with her audience.
She has a charming habit of interrupting her own poems with asides. For instance, reading her poem 'A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Water', which begins
'Who hasn't seen
a plain ordinary
steel needle float serene
on water as if lying on a pillow?'
she broke off to say that perhaps some of us have not seen this? But we needed to know she had had a childhood bereft of electricity, implying they had to make their own amusements...before continuing with the poem.
She also does not like to have her poems described as 'compressed' though, skimming through online reviews, I see they often do. Little 'dioramas' or those shoe-box worlds to be viewed through a pin-hole kids create is how she describes their imaginative worlds - though she likes the 'heft' of facts, they may include invented facts and are definitely not confessional like Lowell and co. The poems are all tight, economic, precise and vivid: (qualities much appreciated in Scottish poetry and perhaps why she is particularly appreciated up here) with a wit, an original, almost eccentric slant on life which often, unfashionably, sounds aphoristic.
Here is a snippet from her latest collection, 'Odd Blocks' (Carcanet, 2011):
A bestiary catalogs
bests......
Best is not to be confused with good -
a different creature altogether,
and treated of in the goodiary -
a text alas lost now for centuries.
(Bestiary)
And an example of humour and a more serious double-take in 'Doubt':
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.
Neither may you answer
the stranger's knock;
you know it is the Person from Porlock
who eats dreams for dinner,
his napkin stained the most delicate colors.
In Edinburgh, at least, her dark blue calf-hugging wellingtons were very fetching - I see Katy Evans-Bush (Baroque in Hackney blog) commented on those at the Aldeburgh Festival, Kay's previous reading. Very wise, though the weather on her visit not being quite so wet despite our reputation for dreich, nor so pebbly, though the cobbles of the Royal Mile are a challenge.
Here is an inspiring You Tube clip of Kay from an interview by Dana Gioia. I like the implied message : forget the razzmatazz of acclaim and fame. Lead a quiet life. Just get on with it (writing the poems.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOkIySzTZN4
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