Sense and Nonsensibility

Who wrote this poem, titled “Repulsive Theory?”

“Little has been made
of the soft skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and in-curved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it’s got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending off –
extending far beyond the personal,
I’m convinced –
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.”

Those of you fortunate enough to have read at least one of Kay Ryan’s densely compact poems before will recognize her philosophical wit and playful seriousness. No other poet, so far as I know, writes this way. The mouth, the first judge of poetry, relishes her phrases, her savory way with words: “pillowy/principle of repulsion,” “the oiled motions/of avoidance,” “all the dimpled depths/of pooling space.” On the page, her poems are skinny but not from undernourishment. They are muscled but sveltely graceful, like ballerinas, though less wispy and self-regarding. Ryan sometimes skirts whimsy, the death knell of wit, but she seldom hobbles her poems with obvious punchlines. Like peanuts they are compulsively consumable, but slow down. Their humor, like cold capsules, is time-released, so allow them plenty of time. The poem above is from her latest collection, The Niagara River.

The May issue of Poetry contains an essay by Ryan, available online, titled "A Consideration of Poetry," the first of her prose I have read. Its winning first sentence goes like this: “I have always felt that much of the best poetry is funny.” As if to top that, in the second sentence she suggests that Hopkins’ “The Windhover” triggers “a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh.” Besides Hopkins, she cites Frost, Edward Lear, Dickinson, Catullus, Cavafy – excellent company. She sometimes reminds me of Stevie Smith, but her poems are tighter and starker and more substantial – less whimsical, though I love Smith. Ryan writes:

“Nonsense exists only in relation to sense. It uses the rules of sense but comes to different conclusions. What is it but nonsense that has taken the grave weight of Frosts’ and Dickinson’s poems – the sensible, expressible weight of them: all that is new is soon lost; human grief finds no sympathy in nature – and has left them weightless? Because if these poems, or a Shakespeare sonnet or a dark sonnet by Donne, had not had their arguments undone somehow, they would indeed crash upon our heads like hammers.”

In the same issue of Poetry is a new poem by the incomparable Geoffrey Hill, “On Seeing the Wind at Hope Mansell,” also available online.