'A Glass Filled With a Supersaturate Solution'

“[S]he is one of the few truly compelling stylists now at work. Her voice is authoritative, confident, unfussy, exacting. She is never overtly confessional, which sets her apart from many poets writing since the Romantics. She makes rare company.” 

And isn’t that what we look for in a writer? We value a handful of them for many idiosyncratic reasons, some likely unknown to us, but perhaps chief among them a sense of camaraderie, a thematic and stylistic affinity, a sympathetic understanding of the world. They repay our attentions and echo the responses of our better selves.  

 

The observation above comes from David Mason’s review of five volumes of poems, “Youth in Age, Age in Youth,” in the Summer 2010 issue of The Hudson Review. He is celebrating Kay Ryan and her collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. “One still meets readers who don't ‘get’ her,” Mason writes, “who find her poems facile instead of the surprisingly expansive little devils they truly are. . . . I have the feeling a vitality like hers will not be denied by posterity.”

 

When I first encountered Ryan’s poems some twenty-five years ago, I mistook her for being merely glib and clever, like so many writers of light verse. Soon, as I lived with her work, I came to agree with Nige at Nigeness, who recently surprised me when he noted that Ryan “might now be our best living poet.” Momentarily, I scoffed. Yes, I scoffed. Now I would add she has only a handful of contenders for that title. Consider one of the qualities Mason celebrates: vitality, so rare in most of the exhausted poems written today. The opposite of that virtue is a stillborn inertness, words dead on the page. Take a Ryan poem chosen at random, “Insult” (Elephant Rocks, 1996; The Best of It, 2010):

 

“Insult is injury

taken personally,

saying, This is not

a random fracture

that would have happened

to any leg out there;

this was a conscious unkindness.

We need insult to remind us

that we aren’t always just hurt,

that there are some sources—

even in the self—parts of which

tread on other parts with such boldness

that we must say, You must stop this.”

 

Even without knowledge of Ryan’s personal life, we recognize nothing confessional here, no kneejerk complaining about insults. The operative words: “even in the self.” Ryan is mature enough to suggest we not personalize every hurt, loss or disappointment. Time to grow up and take responsibility like an adult.

 

“Reading Before Breakfast” is an essay collected in Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (Grove Press, 2020). In her third paragraph she mentions Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature (1980) and likens rereading to “our most picturesque images of creation and transformation.” Typically, she uses a scientific analogy:

 

“[I]magine a glass filled with a supersaturate solution; if you give it a tap, it could turn to crystals. Rereading is like these mysteries. Open to a paragraph or even a line and—tap!—the complete composition precipitates. I never ‘acquire’ these books. It is maddening, but I can never remember books, especially my favorite ones. I don’t like them to come up in conversation. But if I reread a line, then it is all around me again, my real landscape, my real feelings, all familiar. Where have I been?”

 

Ryan is describing my reaction to reading her poems again, after months away. In explanation of her essay’s title, Ryan says she means the books she reads first thing in the morning, before writing. It’s only then, she says, that she can “bear them”: “I go to these writers because they contain the original ichor.” For the Greeks, ichor is the ethereal fluid flowing through the veins of the gods. We might think of it as a divine energy drink—Monster for immortals.

Ryan cites an interesting assortment of writers and books: Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed, Martin Buber’s The Legend of the Baal-Shem, William Bronk’s Vectors and Smoothable Curves. “I notice that most of my morning books,” she writes, “are by poets and novelists—but their essays rather than their poetry or novels.”  Which is precisely the category of book we are reading by Ryan. She approvingly closes her brief essay with lines from Auden’s essay collection The Dyer’s Hand (1962):

 

“Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anyone else to hear of it.”

 

Still, like Ryan, we share it.