"It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." Whether or not you agree with that ominous pronouncement from William Carlos Williams, you will come away from former U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Kay Ryan's refreshing Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose--her first collection of nonfiction--with a deeper appreciation of poetry's worth.
The 32 pieces in this volume balance criticism (more appropriately, appreciation--save for a mild poke at Walt Whitman) of some of Ryan's favorite poets and other literary essays with a few helpings of memoir. Most of her subjects, including Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, will be well-known to even casual students of poetry. But Ryan devotes two affectionate, if candid, essays to the British poet Stevie Smith, someone who "does everything possible to cartoonify herself and her work," yet whose poems "can't in the long run be separated from the True, the Beautiful, the Timeless, the deeply moving."
In a useful introduction, the poet Christian Wiman praises Ryan's "amiable porcupine pose," a characteristic that's one of the most enjoyable features of the collection. For anyone who's ever attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference, Ryan's gimlet-eyed account of the 2005 event in Vancouver will be a revelation. In its first sentence, she defines herself as "a person who does not go to writers' conferences," and in the balance of the essay she makes clear why, training her sharp wit on a series of panels on subjects like "The Contemporary Sestina," a form, she notes, "which had its heyday in the Middle Ages."
Ever the iconoclast, Ryan derides the common advice to poets (or writers in general for that matter) to keep a notebook. To her, they are "the devil's bible. They are the books of understanding later." But despite her admonition about the "importance to the poet of avoiding or ignoring Kodak moments," Ryan writes with great feeling about the day she became a poet, "a mystery before which one must simply bow down." In her case, it occurred in the Colorado Rockies, on a cross-country bicycle trip she took in 1976, at age 30. "My brain was like a stunt kite," she writes, and then she tried out the question whether she should be writer and heard, "Do you like it?" To that ghostly question, she responded, "I had never heard anything so right. Yes; I did like it, that was all there was to it. I laughed and laughed and laughed." The rest, as one might say, is history. Or poetry. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: An eminent American poet turns to prose to illuminate her craft and her life.