The Reluctant Poet Laureate

Kay Ryan has lived in the same small house on a hill in Marin County, Calif., for 30 years. She shingled the exterior walls and covered the steps and walkways in bright tile scraps herself. The house suits her—filled with artwork by friends and with books, surrounded by mountain-biking trails, sheltered by plants. She likes being in this out-of-the-way place, keeping her distance. As she settles into a faded pink director's chair, chatting amiably, her hazel eyes are warm but a little guarded. This is what she had dreaded when she agreed to become the poet laureate of the United States—that a reporter would show up at her door and ask her to hold forth on the State of American Poetry for the Masses. But Ryan is a kind and generous person, and so she has sliced lime for this interloper's sparkling water, offered her cut cantaloupe, and invited her onto the tiny deck lined with low-hanging strawberries, a geranium, lemon verbena, cacti. The pots were planted by Carol Adair, Ryan's spouse and longtime partner, who died of cancer in January. Ryan is doing her best to keep the plants alive, to halt the geranium's browning.

 

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Adair is the reason that Ryan is the poet laureate, she says. They returned home from a trip to Aspen last July to find a message on the answering machine from James Billington, the librarian of Congress, asking Ryan to call him at home. Ryan knew that there was only one reason Billington would call. She told Adair that she did not want to do it. "I feel it's hard enough to represent myself," she says. "The idea of representing capital-P Poetry … It was a horrible thought. I'm not an ambassador." But the next morning she accepted. "I did that because Carol was sick. I told her all my reasons why I didn't want to do it, and she said, 'I understand, so do it for me.' "

Ryan has long had an ambivalent relationship with exposure, and she has always resisted change. "I'm eager for stasis," she says, "because I can count on its being disrupted." While some poets thrive on the drama of their own experience and others want to capture the cacophonous world, Ryan probes the cracks and edges in her mind. Out of those crevices, the disruptions in a quiet life, come her poems.

There are high places
that don't invite us,
sharp shapes, glacier-
scraped faces, whole
ranges whose given names
slip off. Any such relation
as we try to make
refuses to take. Some
high lakes are not for us,
some slick escarpments.
I'm giddy with thinking
where thinking can't stick.

—"No Names"

Ryan was born in 1945, just after the end of World War II. Her father was an oil-well driller in the San Joaquin Valley. When he died, she wrote a poem that still surprises her with its power. His death "let out something from the core," she says. "It took me years to write something so pure again." She was 19 and a student at Antelope Valley College, a community college in the Mojave Desert. That is where she began reading poetry, when a stern teacher led her to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, John Donne (all poets who, not coincidentally, echo in her own work)—in part by demanding that their poetry be taken seriously or not at all. From community college Ryan made her way to UCLA, where she earned undergraduate and master's degrees, and then to a Ph.D. program at UC Irvine, which she soon quit. She read poetry for the "remote feeling of company," she said—the sense of being at once together and alone. ("It takes two points/to make a distance," one of her poems slyly puts it.) But she needed to get out of the classroom, to get lost, to find that feeling.

Ryan was not yet a poet. Though she felt drawn to writing, she resisted it. "I just didn't like the style that saying 'poet' meant," she says. "Anne Sexton was a poet. Robert Lowell was a poet. People who cut a dramatic swath. Lots of medication. I didn't want to be dramatic." But on a cross-country biking trip, she had what she calls an epiphany. (Always on guard for high drama, she adds that she considered it an epiphany "reluctantly.") "It was a real one," she says. It was also a complicated one. Writing poetry meant exposure, meant bearing herself to the public eye. She could have put her poems in a drawer and left them there, but she wanted her work to have an audience. "One of the elements of an art is the fact that it communicates," Ryan says. "The transaction isn't complete if you don't publish."

Ryan's road-to-Damascus moment galvanized her, but the way was lonely. She eschewed the more traditional avenues to success—M.F.A. programs, conferences. The carnivorous workshop crowd, with its demands and expectations, horrified her. To support herself, she taught remedial English part-time at the College of Marin, a community college near her home. Her reluctance (or inability) to participate in the more established circles, however, meant that she was in the same boat as thousands of hopeful amateurs—throwing a message in a bottle into the sea and hoping to be discovered. "I just felt hopeless about ever getting published," Ryan says.