U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan/ Photo credit Christina Koci Hernandez

NOTE: Read the full interview with U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan the end of the story.

U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan at never wanted to be a poet.

“I didn’t want to be something I’d be ashamed to tell my grandfather about,” she says of a profession that culls images of men in puffy shirts writing my candlelight in a French garrett.

Perhaps that’s why she writes so economically, as if every word was a reluctant concession to her calling; each syllable measured in dollhouse spoons of wit, intelligence and observation; every rhyme tucked slyly into unexpected places.

As in “Crocodile Tears.”

The one sincere

crocodile has

gone dry eyed

for years. Why

bother crying

crocodile tears.

Ryan, who reads her work Tuesday as part of Colorado College’s Visiting Writers Series, came from a blue collar California family, her mother a teacher who needed preferred silence and her father a dreamer who ended up an oil well driller.

She has written five books of poetry. She’s been lauded by critics and received great awards, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize of $100,000. In 2008, Ryan became the 16th to hold the title poet laureate and as such, is charged with raising national consciousness of the art.

“From small childhood, I’ve always adored words,” she says. “Or early childhood, I should say.” She thinks about it. “I do like the sound of ‘small childhood.’”

She resisted poetry, though, until somewhere in the middle of an 80-day bicycle journey from California and Virginia. There, the limitlessness of the natural world changed something in her. Everything seemed possible.

“That was it,” says Ryan, who taught remedial English for more than 30 years.

Critics often bring up Emily Dickinson when talking about her work. You can see why in Ryan’s neat thinking, her simple but precise writing and akimbo juxtapositions that can resonate with surprising power.

Ryan. 64, will have none of it, adding that it’s a comparison that she can’t stand up to. She laughs.

But there is something in the work that seems to excite other writers and critics, who revel in their descriptions of her work like a dog rolls in something forbidden.

“Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes,” wrote poet and critic J.D. McClatchy.

“Rather than raise a righteous old hullabaloo,” writes David Kirby in a New York Times review of her book, “The Niagara River,” “a Ryan poem sticks the reader with a little jab of smarts and then pulls back as fast as a doctor’s hypodermic.”

As poet laureate, writing is harder now. Although the job doesn’t actually require her to do much — give a couple readings a year, suggest other poets for readings and give a couple prizes — her schedule is quite crowded. Schools and individuals request readings. People ask for to look at their work.

“If you have a shred of socialization you feel some obligation to respond,” she says. “I’ve had to call up on my very limited stores of socialization.

“But it is very hard to get any writing done. Writing takes a great deal of time. The activities associated with being the laureate breaks up my time. I don’t have time to get really, really bored.”

Desperation, she adds, is the soil of poetry.

This summer she was reappointed to the position. So she’s got some time figure it all out.

“I’m getting better at it.” she says. “It seemed like a big joke for a long time. Not exactly a funny joke either.”

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Contact the writer: 476-1602 or tracy.mobleymartinez@gazette.com.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH U.S. POET LAUREATE KAY RYAN

Q: So, how is the title Poet Laureate fit these days? Has it become more comfortable?

A: I’m getting better at it. It seemed like a big joke for a long time. Not exactly a funny joke either.

Q: You know, the title seems kind of incongruous for our age.

A: I think it just takes a long time to understand that you’re not going to understand (it). … Pretty soon you’re comfortable with the face that you’re not going to understand.

Q: How do you find time to work with what I assume is a busy schedule now.

A: In a way, it’s as demanding as the laureate decides. It’s possible to say “no” to everything. You’re under no requirement under the librarian of Congress other than to give a couple of a readings a year and suggest the name of poets to give readings and give a couple of prizes. That’s all you have to do. But the broadcast of the news of the new poet laureate always invites a lot of invitations from schools and individuals, requests to look at people’s poems. If you have a shread of socialization, you feel some obligation to respond.

Q: But, of course, we’re talking about poets, so socialization isn’t necessarily a given.

A: (Laughs) That’s true. I’ve had to call upon my very limited stores on socialization. But it’s very hard to get any writing done. Writing takes a great deal of blank time. The activities associated with being the laureate breaks up my time. I don’t have time to get really, really bored.

Q: That’s a necessary ingredient then?

A: Yes, I think , in a way, desperation is the soil of poetry.

Q: Tell me a little about your working process. Do you reserve time for writing or do you just find yourself writing a poem?

A: I mean, of course, as soon as you say how you do something, you don’t do it that way anymore. I’m a writer so it begins with an empty mind, which is very easy for me because my mind is pretty empty. … I write in the morning in bed. I’m very hard on my pajama collection. I read something with intellectually challenging. Like Italo Calvino or Vladimir Nabokov. Not fiction, though. I read highly intelligent essays. Maybe Joseph Brodsky. Not that I get an idea from that. It bangs my head in ways that bring up something or other. Some little traces of something that I can begin with. … Getting started is the most awkward part. You’re beginning something that has no reality yet. That requires a lot of faith.

I usually finish a poem in one morning. I might easily write 10 or 15 pages of drafts. Maybe three false starts or maybe it changes entirely. I will have an end product. Then it’s not any good. But sometimes it is good. You do a lot of work.

Q: As you describe it sounds very much like a craft.

A: It is very much a craft and I feel so frustrated when people seem to think that’s it’s enough to just enthuse. Or it’s just something, some kind of dew that appears on the brow or lip of the poet. That you don’t have to work to get at it.

It’s the most thrilling thing I ever do. I guess that’s the reason I do it. That engagement with language is the deepest understanding that I can come to. Other people have it manipulating painting, or manipulating metal or glass or maybe they have it in a social relationship, in an entirely different dimension. For me, I know when I part of the constellation. I can know a thing that I can’t know any other way. Unfortunately, I can’t that knowledge away from that: I can visit it but the poem has it. I don’t have it.

One of the things that a poem has to do is give you enough surface pleasure immediately so people will be willing to do the hard work of getting into it. My brain, I discovered a long time ago, when I write, it goes naturally to things that you see. … I’m looking right now at a pitcher sitting in wash basin on a dresser. I’m thinking I might easily rhyme that with culture. Any number of words going work with culture. I could rhyme it with water. When Iuse the word, it invites all its friends to the party. Then I have this immense party and I need to put a bouncer at the door.

I think metaphorically and metaphors have their own life. As soon as you say old as the hills — which is a simile, not a metaphor — I start thinking of the age of the hills and the lives of the hills. Metaphor has its own desire for life, just as rhyme does.

When I’m writing I’m trying to get somewhere. I want to stake a claim for silence, which, of course, is happening in “Sharks’ Teeth.” I want to talk about the incredible muscularity of silence. I just want to. All these other things want to distract me, to get me drunk. Under the best circumstances I’m led astray far enough to surprise myself and the reader. And to have a shred of meaning. I mean, beyond just story or superfluous meaning. Some ineffable something that we can’t completely touch but would love to get near.

Q: When you say meaning, sometimes I think it’s just resonance; that the poem resonates in some way with the reader.

A: Yes, it’s not extractable. The meaning is not in any way extractable. You have a sense of something living in there that echoes in your mind.

Q: Your poems compared with Emily Dickinson’s. Who do you see as an influence or does the work come from a place that’s completely your own?

A: All writing comes from writing. So I think it comes from absolutely everything that I’ve ever soaked up, from what I’ve read and what I’ve heard. From small childhood I’ve always adored just words themselves. Or early childhood, I should say. I do like the sound of small childhood. As a child, I had a private game that I had to always say something differently than I’d said it before. It was for my own amusement. No one else cared.

The comparison to Emily Dickinson is a problem. Emily Dickinson is simply our greatest poet, in my mind. Certainly the same claim can be made for Whitman. They are our great, towering parents. I think I can do nothing but be dismissed by such comparisons. I can only lose by that comparison. I don’t have any clear predecessors.

I’ve been given great comfort by Emily Dickinson’s work. She’s terrific company and I think she certainly showed that it was possible to work in very small forms that certain weren’t popular when I started to write in the ‘70s. The whole idea of things stripped or witty or with a strong streak of brain in them, they just smelled of brain and that wasn’t a popular smell. It was much more popular to smell of animal.

Q: Do you think that’s why it took so long for your work to be recognized?

A: I think it’s astonishing that I’ve ever been recognized. I didn’t have high hopes.

Q: Which is a good way to live really.

A: That was it. I didn’t want to be (a poet). My dad was an oil well driller. We were blue collar people. I admired working people. I didn’t want to be something I’d be ashamed to tell my grandfather about. Of course, being a woman there wasn’t much expectation for me other than getting married and having children.

Q: I guess in a way you were already lost.

A: I was lost. (Laughs.) Going into high school, I asked my mother what she thought I should do. … “Well, take a secretarial course so if your husband dies you’ll have a way to support the children.” I remember thinking, OK, there are no answers there.

You know, it was a shock. She wasn’t saying it because it was a great idea. She just said it because she couldn’t think of any other idea.

Q: I think it take quite a bit of courage to claim that, being a poet.

A: I think you have to overcome that. I would say that I’m very interested in things I don’t want to know. I’m not very interested in what I want to know. … Becoming a poet, which still makes me cringe, becoming a person who has written poems for at least 40 year, it has forced to me too look. I’m much happier with that kind of struggle. I trust it more.

Q: So why do you think poetry is still relevant in a world in which texting passes for conversation?

A: Because eventually we get tired of ourselves. You know, it takes us a long time, but there is a night when we get tired of ourselves or things or all our projects go horribly awry and we’re lost. And really, think of 9-11. When things break up people go reaching not for a novel or an essay. They go reaching for a line of poetry. They find something there. You know, it happens.

Q: And sometimes I think it’s not meaning they’re looking for, but the neat way that some poems can complete themselves, like a circuit.

A: The whole deal is getting near the message. We can’t think of poetry having any extractable message. I think that’s the reason they like it or hate it. … The meaning of a poem is absolutely in its writing. That’s the thrill. … They’re like an incantation. They bring something close but aren’t sure what that is. I read “Sharks’ Teeth” that way. I can’t tell you what it is.

Q: Does that feel comfortable to you, not knowing what it is exactly?

A: Sometimes that feels comfortable and sometimes it doesn’t feel comfortable.

That’s one that happens to a writer over a lifetime: One becomes a reader of one’s own poems. A different me reads that poem than wrote it. Something I wrote 20 years ago might not stand the test. The death of my partner in January really tested a lot of the work.

Q: I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.

A: It is. We were together 30 years.

Q: I just can’t imagine what you do after something like that.

A: You get some work to do and you do it.

 details

U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Cornerstone Arts Center, Colorado College, 825 N. Cascade Ave.

Admission: Free; 389-6607, coloradocollege.edu

“Sharks’ Teeth”

By Kay Ryan

Everything contains some

silence. Noise gets

its zest from the

small shark’s-tooth

shaped fragments

of rest angled

in it. An hour

of city holds maybe

a minute of these

remnants of a time

when silence reigned,

compact and dangerous

as a shark. Sometimes

a bit of a tail

or fin can still

be sensed in parks.

Source: Poetry (April 2004).

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