`The Northern Lights of Her Continual Irony'

The funniest person I know – all of his instincts are effortlessly, naturally funny – joined the staff of the newspaper where I was working in upstate New York 20 years ago. Like me, John was a reporter, though he covered a suburban beat and I wrote features. Some people who fancy themselves humorists are, in fact, histrionic narcissists. They try too hard and the effort is deadly: If a joke flops the first time, repeat it seven or eight times. John is different. His timing and sense of brevity are flawless, and he knows how to size up an audience. Returning from his rounds, he regaled the city desk with stories of malfeasance and general idiocy. Where others saw cause for outrage and cynicism, John saw unadulterated human comedy. At least until he sat at the keyboard and tried to turn raw reporting into 12 inches of copy. Everyday, John choked. The membrane between his spoken and written language was not permeable. It was plate steel.

John left the business, went to Cornell and became a lawyer. He’s still funny and much wealthier and more successful.

I thought of John while reading Kay Ryan again. John’s dilemma will never be hers. She’s no journalist, but she reliably delivers news that stays news. She’s a general-assignment reporter, and her beat one day is epistemology, aesthetics the next, without the dullness those categories suggest. Her poems, already compressed, cannot be reduced to “theme.” Her short lines are elliptical and suggestive. Her unit is the word or word-cluster. She flatters the reader into attentiveness. Here is “Blandeur” from Say Uncle:

“If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.”

That cluster of trochees is funny – but not merely funny -- and the last two lines, also funny, look sideways at Hopkins. We read a Ryan poem once to orient ourselves, to catch the rhythm and direction; again for the way she toys with single words (“flatten/Eiger, blanden”); and again and again to enjoy the whole unlikely apparatus. Ryan has the funny person’s and the serious person’s gift or affliction of hypersensitivity to words. Words have meaning, yes, and also music, heft, taste, echo and mass. Words displace nothing. Ryan’s please the tongue and mind. In his review of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems, published in 1952 in Partisan Review, Randall Jarrell might be describing Ryan’s work:

“She wished to trust, as absolutely as she could, in flat laconic matter-of-factness, in the minimal statement, understatement: these earlier poem of hers approach as a limit, a kind of ideal minimal statement, a truth thought of as underlying, prior to, all exaggeration and error; the poet has tried to strip or boil everything down to the point of hard, objective, absolute precision.”

Jarrell’s passage would deny Moore and Ryan their wit and comedy, but he addresses that elsewhere in his review. He praises Moore’s “exactness, concision, irony,” and memorably notes that her poems “sparkle under the Northern Lights of her continual irony.” That slippery word, irony, should not be confused here with postmodern glibness. Moore and Ryan are elegant moralists. They skirt whimsy and cuteness but elude their fatal allure. Each, as Auden wrote of Henry James, is a “Master of nuance and scruple.” Here’s a poem thematically similar to “Blandeur” – “Nothing Getting Past” from The Niagara River:

“If life is a
thin film
sandwiched between twin
immensities
of nothing
you get the best
taste of this
out west in
the open country
where a keen
could mean the
double scrape
of nothing almost
touching nothing
or the wind
coming through
dry grass. In
either case it's
pretty close
to nothing
getting past.”

Ryan takes a term from physics and materials science – “thin film” – jiggers it to fit a string of food metaphors, works in some internal rhymes (one of her trademarks) and a quiet allusion to “The Hollow Men,” and repeats “nothing” four times in 21 lines (it shows up 29 times in King Lear, more often than in any of Shakespeare’s plays). The result, in other hands, could have been preachy and dull. In Ryan’s, it’s like one of John’s stories – the spoken ones, I mean – funny and true.