`The Strange Seeing-In'

It seems inevitable Kay Ryan would eventually get around to writing a poem about the Dutch still-life painters of the 17th century. Like hers, their canvases are small, densely detailed and carefully lit. Their cardinal virtues, like hers, are concision and precision, though none is so imaginatively impoverished as to be a “minimalist.” Rather, they did more with less and managed to be simultaneously explicit and suggestive. No one reads a Ryan poem once, or rushes past a still life by Floris van Schooten or Floris Claesz van Dijck. Ryan has six poems in the summer issue of The American Scholar, with a brief introduction, “Confluence of Sound and Sense,” by the journal’s poetry editor, Langdon Hammer. None is available online but here, from the print edition, is “Finish”:

“The grape and plum
might be said to
tarnish when ripe,
developing some
sort of light dust
on their finish
which the least
touch disrupts.
It is this that
the great Dutch
still lifes catch,
the brush as
much in love
with talc as
with polish.
Also with the
strange seeing-in
you notice when
a bruise mars
a fruit’s surface.”

To see the phenomenon Ryan describes – the glow of ripeness accompanied by “light dust” (with “light” possessing at least two meanings) -- go here to view “Laid Table with Cheeses and Fruit” (c. 1615) by Floris Claesz van Dijck, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. After you stop salivating, observe the dish of grapes to the left. Even in low-resolution the dust is visible, as is the sheen on the skins of the fruit. Only gifted artists, in any medium, can render both. The poem’s final five lines are its saddest and most intriguing. The grape is bruised, yes, but so is a poem, or any work of art. And don’t we involuntarily reveal something, to others and ourselves, through a “strange seeing-in,” when we bruise? Nothing is so tender as innocence. Hammer writes in his introduction:

“Ryan’s poems reflect back on their own activity in ways that make the poem itself a model of the experience or idea it investigates.”

Ryan, I think, is honoring the still-life painters for their gift of seeing beauty in the humble, revelation in the commonplace. Another admirer of the great Dutch masters is Zbigniew Herbert, whose poetry shares concision and comedy with Ryan’s. In “The Price of Art,” collected in Still Life with a Bridle, he writes:

“They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”