'Read Something of Thrilling Quality'

It’s not a new feeling but it seems to be nagging with a new persistence: people, writers in particular, complaining about everything and not giving thanks for anything. All of us are equipped to bore each other with a litany of woes. I’m not encouraging Pollyanna-ism or proposing a collective hug. Pain and loss are real but so are the unearned gifts all of us receive. Consider what Kay Ryan says in her Paris Review interview:

“I’ve had a terrifically fortunate life. Which is not to say I’m talking nothing but sunshine. A certain kind of perhaps rather unwholesome-looking distortion or lopsidedness is necessary to the writer’s mind, but I never wanted to add to the grief of being human, the burden of it, or have my work do that. I never wanted to make things harder for people, or to make them feel more weighed down or guilty.”

 

Like her poems, Ryan’s remarks are bracing, ice water on a hot Houston afternoon. She doesn’t indulge bullshit, the seductively self-deceiving kind that compounds self-pity with petulance and calls itself honesty. Writers are lucky. We always have words to play with. So often I understand nothing until I write about it. The interviewer asks, “What can ‘trip’ your mind?” and Ryan answers: “People can do it, but honestly, it’s writing. The only real access that I have to my mind is when I’m writing.”

 

Dedicated writers will understand. Not writing is just time spent waiting to write. The best writers are aloof, natural-born spectators, not, God forbid, “activists.” And they are readers. An aliterate writer is an offensive oxymoron. Ryan goes on to describe my M.O.:

 

“One of the best ways to get started writing is to read something of thrilling quality. I never read poetry or fiction, and anything that smacks of usefulness—science or biography—is off-limits.  . . . Essentially, I read literary essays. I like superarrogant, high-level, brainy essays about aesthetics. I had a Nabokov jag for a couple of years: his Lectures on Literature. [Milan] Kundera has two beautiful books of essays. There’s also Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. [Zbigniew] Herbert has that wonderful book Still Life with Bridal [sic but worth considering].”

 

When the interviewer asks, “Why do you think writing attracted you?” Ryan answers:

 

“It’s a way of thinking unlike any other. [Joseph] Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. Thinking takes place in language, and it’s hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinking is creating the language. If I don’t write poetry, in the profoundest way I have no way to think.”