'An Art that Must Be Exact About the Uncertain'

After an absence, reading Kay Ryan again is a lark. She is the rare contemporary poet who inspires old-fashioned, much-maligned readerly emotions: happiness, contentment, even joy. Her angle is always unexpected, even when we expect unexpectedness of her. No one is wittier or less cheap. There’s no axe-grinding, thank God. Her poems can be syntactically Elizabethan but always reward the attentive reader. Like some cross-pollination of Marianne Moore and X.J. Kennedy, she can make us contemplative while making us laugh out loud. Here is “Grazing Horses” from Say Uncle (2000):

“Sometimes the

green pasture

of the mind

tilts abruptly.

The grazing horses

struggle crazily

for purchase

on the frictionless

nearly vertical

surface. Their

furniture-fine

legs buckle

on the incline,

unhorsed by slant

they weren’t

designed to climb

and can’t.”

The second line recalls the Psalmist: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.” Green signifies paradise, whether in the dry Holy Land or America’s dry Holy Land, California. This mental paradise suffers a seismic disturbance, a peculiarly geometric earthquake (again, California). The mind’s content, poor horses, scramble and slip away. But I also thought of that disputed line in Henry V. At the start of Act II, Scene 3, a character named Hostess (probably Mistress Quickly from Henry IV) describes the death of Sir John Falstaff:

“…after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields.”

The final phrase has been read as a mishearing of Psalm 23. Guy Davenport titled his 1993 story collection A Table of Green Fields. We know from Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (2007) that Davenport approved the following passage for his book’s dust jacket:

“A constant theme in this book is the transmission of the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff’s dying vision of `a table of green fields,’ probably a mishearing of his recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to ‘he babbled of green fields,’ a symbol of all fiction, an art that must be exact about the uncertain.”

There’s a nice summing-up of Kay Ryan’s strategy: “an art that must be exact about the uncertain.”