Kay Ryan’s poetry ekes down pages in skeltonic columns. She has remained relatively obscure for much of her career, while being shunned by editors that have found her poetry not “en vogue.”
Ryan is now finishing her term as U.S. Poet Laureate, the 10th woman to receive the title, and is looking forward to rebooting her writing. However, in the meantime and in her recent travels under her esteemed title, she has been promoting institutions that are many times left by the wayside: community colleges.
“Community colleges deserve a lot more respect and funding and attention,” said Ryan, who herself is a product of Antelope Valley College, a two-year community college in Lancaster, Calif. “It’s just a big pleasure for me to go to community colleges. It feels like my real community, and I’m really happy to go community colleges.”
Especially in the highly academic discipline of poetry, community colleges get nudged out with most of the nation’s best poets, like Louise Gluck, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, and others teaching and writing at the Ivies in the Northeast. Ryan, however, has remained in her home state of California her whole life and has been teaching at the College of Marin since the 1970s. Despite her teaching the same remedial college course since her beginning at Marin, Ryan can sense authenticity from miles away. “There never / seems to be a surface equal / to the needs of these people,” she said in her piece entitled “Outsider Art.” And in her own unparalleled way, Ryan has been able to graft her own brand of authenticity.
Her poetry is dense. She is never short on biting and witty lines, and contrary to many contemporaries, Ryan’s poetry rhymes.
“Every poem is distinct from every other,” Ryan said. “I’m not a poet of nature description or narrative, and my poems don’t create an arch. They don’t collect and make an over-arching story.”
Western poetry’s affinity for naturalism and social movements doesn’t seem to have made an indelible impression on Ryan, as she tends to be more of a rogue in that sense. In distancing herself from different fashions and trends, however, she does retain a sense of home and belonging to the West Coast.
“As a writer, I’ve stayed very independent of all movements,” Ryan said. “I have not been connected to any of them. They just have not been important to my development as a poet. It actually took a long time to get any recognition in the West.”
In her visits to community colleges over her term as Poet Laureate, she has customized her readings to fit her audiences, and Eugene listeners can expect an intimate conversation, unpretentious in its delivery.
“I’ll probably try to incline it in some way in some conceptual way with the Pacific Northwest,” Ryan said concerning her upcoming reading at Lane
Community College. “I am a lifelong Westerner. I’ve lived all my life in California, but I have a lot of attachment to Oregon and Washington.”
There have been two factors that have halted Ryan’s writing of what she would consider “publishable” work in the last few years. One was being named Poet Laureate, and the other was the death of her life partner Carol Adair last year.
“Carol’s passing had its effect combined with being named Poet Laureate,” Ryan said. “It had the effect of pretty much stopping any sort of writing that I’ve sought to publish. I have done some writing, but it’s not writing that I want to put in magazines.”
For many writers, like Ryan, times of emotional upheaval present a predicament in terms of literary output. No doubt, there is ample material to go off of, as well as raw emotion, yet successfully articulating those torrential surges
of emotion is something that many find difficult.
“I think that too much emotion, it paralyzes me in terms of writing,” Ryan said. “A lot of people think that poetry comes out of an overflow of feeling or an overflow of emotion, but I find that too much emotion simply dams up the ability to write.”
Her new book “The Best of It — New and Selected Poems” combines some of Ryan’s newer work with what she says is the “best of previous work.” But it will only be at the end of her term that Ryan will be able to recollect thoughts and pinpoint concrete emotion.
“I’m looking forward to the end of my term, and I’m hoping to write again,” Ryan said. “To be able to write in ways that are intelligent and liberating.”
Ryan will be doing a public reading at the Lane Community College’s Center for Reading and Learning at its main campus tonight at 7 p.m.
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