`Security and Exhilaration'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along links to Kay Ryan's interview with The Paris Review and a poem in the same issue, "The Walking Stick Insect." Ryan is the antithesis of most contemporary poets -- she's funny, self-deprecating and her poems make sense and are a pleasure to read. Here are two of her observations:

“I think there’s too much poetry out there. I don’t need to add to the waste stream.”

“It seemed like I was going to be Henry Darger. The poems would have been stuck in my room. I’ve gotten a lot of my subject matter from failure. I began to think of myself as a terrific underdog. There’s a certain security and exhilaration in that.”