Post from: Colorado Springs Arts Blog

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.”

—

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).

Post from: Colorado Springs Arts Blog

It allows her to weave from one subject to another, to another, finding funny wherever she goes.

She performed Thursday night at the Pikes Peak Center, taking on so-called “Tea Party” activists, anti-gay rights people and those unfortunate enough to find seats in the front row: not that unusual for comic subjectmatter.

But it was her style that made the biggest impression. She clearly has no script, and I wonder if she even has a vague structure in her mind of where she’s going. She just noodles around, with seeming blind faith that she’ll run into something funny if she keeps talking. … and she almost always did.

That freeform style found its sharpest focus when she took to the people in the first few rows of the audience. It always started with “And, sir, what do you do for a living?”

The first guy she pounced on said he ran a plumbing company. How long had he been doing plumbing?

“Twenty-five to 30 years.”

Well, that’s all Poundstone needed. She wondered how you could not quite know if it was 25 or 30 years, then she had fun with the fact that he did some of the jobs himself, and outsourced others to his two assistants. And what’s the name of his company?

“Do I have to say?” he asks.

So, of course, she starts calling his company “Do I Have to Say.”

And what comic gold she couldn’t mine from the minutia of the plumber’s work, she found in a nearby man who does marketing for Christian youth properties, to rent them on the off seasons.

You can imagine the fun she had with that one.

AND ANOTHER TAKE:

Gazette free-lancer Kate Jonuska was at the show, too, and offers her review as well:

Paula Poundstone gets a dose of Colorado Springs. And vice versa.

By Kate Jonuska

Some people would be surprised at how much applause a Colorado Springs audience can muster when a comedian blatantly proclaims her atheism, supports gay marriage and labels anti-Obama “tea parties” as “nuttery.” But those people apparently weren’t at the Paula Poundstone performance Thursday night at the Pikes Peak Center — or, at least, weren’t there happily or perhaps for very long.

With her signature laid-back style — she actually laid on the stage and propped her feet on a stool at one point — Poundstone’s stand up seemed to wander wherever her mind did, from camping trips with her daughter and the obstinacy of teenage son to Obama’s “controversial” address to school children. (Stay in school, work hard and wash your hands was the message, the same message she’s repeated to her kids over and over. “Let him be the one to go blue in the face,” she says.)

Perhaps Poundstone finally realized where she was when during her popular audience interaction, she met a (totally good sport) marketer for a ministry, or rather, for the ministry’s camp properties. She managed to banter with him amicably — and quite humorously — without once insulting or denigrating religion or religious people, though the marketer’s job description may have taken a good-natured ribbing.

Sneezing and coughing some, battling her allergies, Poundstone did have some excellent homeland security advice. With all the worry, both real and paranoid, about the swine flu, just go ahead and sneeze on terror suspects. That will scare them.

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I like it because it’s long on performance and art immersion and short on award-presentation time and because the arts presented represent such a fun cross-section of our local cultural community.

Yes, like all these kind of awards, there’s a lot of preaching to the choir about the importance of arts in our region. But I look at it as a nice validation of the work artists do and a needed pat on the back for the businesses that support them.

The highlights in the performances: Opera Theatre of the Rockies lyric soprano Desiree Dodson’s heart-breaking rendition of Dvořák’s “Rusalka,” followed by the cultural whiplash of the romping bluegrass band Grass It Up doing their song, “Two Dollar Bill.”

Stick Horses in Pants gets the bravery award for doing improv in such a non-improv-friendly venue. Really, to appreciate the troupe, you need a smaller venue and better acoustics … and it takes them about 15 minutes just to get warmed up. But they got plenty of laughs reenacting an audience member’s story behind her forehead scar.

Other highlights: Folk singer Lindsay Weidmann’s delightful ode to Steve Martin and poets Aaron Anstett and Kaleena Kovach taking on bird shadows and human survival.

You can learn more, including, who the heck won the award by reading Tracy Mobley-Martinez’s story.

Grass It Up

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Which raises a question our story won’t have space to deal with: How do you move five old fine printing presses, weighing up to 3,500 pounds, keeping them from damage and misalignment?

The answer, according to CC’s media relations wiz Leslie Weddell:

Very carefully, and with the help of a dozen people, a moving truck, forklift and tow truck.

Colorado College moved the 31-year-old Press at Colorado College’s collection of fine printing presses and lead type from the basement of Jackson House to a new home in Taylor Hall in mid-August. Five presses, including one built in 1895 and one weighing 3,500 pounds, and more than 500 cases of lead type, were transported across campus in a move that involved removing doors, windows, and a retaining wall from Jackson House.

The transfer of the heavy presses was a very delicate procedure as the movers had to ensure that none of the machinery was damaged or misaligned in the process. The five presses include three proof presses made in the 1960s, one of which was made in Germany and the other two weighing more than 2,000 pounds. In addition, there was a Vandercook roller proofing press, weighing about 3,500 pounds, and one Chandler and Price platen press dating back to 1895.

The biggest of the bunch, the rare Vandercook Universal IV, required the removal of a concrete retaining wall from the Jackson House in order to extract it from the basement. All the presses were then carefully placed into a flat bed truck by a fork lift, ensuring that the very specific factory-set press tolerances were not modified as any variances would negatively affect the quality of a print.

Incidentally, KRCC’s “Big Something” did a nice piece on The Press.

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See what she found out on her blog.

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Mayor Rivera talked a lot about green industries and athletics, but I didn’t hear one word about arts and culture.

A recent study by the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region (COPPeR) estimated that the nonprofit arts industry and its audience have a $94.7 million economic impact in the greater Colorado Springs area each year and generate 2,639 jobs.

The local athletics presence pales in comparison. Think about it. When a corporation decides to locate offices or headquarters, the quality of the cultural landscape is almost up there with a trained workforce.

In the Dream City: Vision 2020 results I’ve seen so far, a vibrant cultural scene figures in so many of the discussions. I was thrilled to hear the mayor quote from a Mike Moran’s Dream City column about his ideas of a vibrant sports scene here in the year 2020. But I’m surprised I didn’t hear at least a nod to all that’s going on and needs to go on to build an exciting center for the arts.

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Springs Magazine ceases publication after 27 years of serving arts community.

COLORADO SPRINGS—Sunrise Publishing, Inc., publishers of the Springs Magazine and Bon Vivant announced today that both magazines ceased publication effective March 31, 2009.

According to publisher Michael Gardner, “It was a wrenching decision. In our 27 years of publication we’ve been through a number of lo cal and national downturns but this most recent recession has been different in many ways. As much as associate publisher Sharon Friedman and I wanted to continue serving the region’s arts community the economics of doing so just weren’t there.”

“I know there are other venues for our advertising customers but I still feel bad about not being there for them,” said Friedman, who is also Director of Advertising. “I’ve worked with many of our clients so long that they are like family and I’m going to miss them terribly. I feel so grateful and honored to have been able to have served them for so long.”

Springs Magazine was the region’s oldest and largest monthly magazine devoted to championing the arts. It would have been 28 years old this May. Bon Vivant, its sister publication, was a high-end four-color slick stock direct mailed publication also focused on local art and artists.

“I know everyone is saying print journalism is an artifact of another century, that the Internet is the future. We considered transitioning to an online platform, like many papers are doing, but frankly there are still too few successful models. The Internet may be publishing’s future but it’s not here yet,” said Gardner.

“It’s been an incredible ride,” said Gardner. “I’m very proud of the stories we’ve done along the way, the message we’ve helped to deliver, that the arts are a vital foundation for a successful community.”

“It’s hard to imagine doing anything else,” said Friedman, a sentiment echoed by Gardner. “I believe we still have ink running in our veins. Even though we won’t be publishing news about the arts we still plan to actively support those who are making it,” said Gardner.

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The Pikes Peak Poet Laureate, Aaron Anstett, is now accepting poems to be included in our “Poetry While You Wait” program. Selected poems will be published in April 2009 in booklets and on placards and distributed free to businesses and other places where people wait for services, such as dentists’ and doctors’ offices, auto repair shops, beauty salons, barber shops, hospitals, bus stops, laundromats and other places throughout the Pikes Peak region, to provide the surprises and delights of poetry. Selected poems may also be disseminated through various print and electronic media to inspire and celebrate poetry in the Pikes Peak region. Poets of all ages, diverse talents, and backgrounds from El Paso and Teller counties are encouraged to send us their original poems that are suitable for the general public.

You may also call the COPPeR office at 634-2204.

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