The Reluctant Poet Laureate

She might have kept on feeling helpless had it not been for Adair. Ryan met Adair in 1977, around the time she started writing seriously. Adair was part of San Quentin State Prison's education department, where Ryan taught an English class. They fell in love. "A prison romance!" Ryan quips. Adair became more than just her partner, though. She was "my strongest advocate and my single companion in my poetry life," Ryan says. Adair didn't know any more about how to get a poem published than Ryan did, but she was determined. She had put herself through college as a single mother in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a teacher. Shortly before her death Adair mused, "I think what's at the bottom of me is optimism and will."

When I ask Ryan if there was a connection between her beginning to write poetry and her meeting Adair, she hesitates. "I can't know," she replies, her voice quiet. "I know that she took my work seriously; it was important to her. But really—if I had built barns, that might have been equally important to her." Adair's support was unconditional. "She just knew anything one wanted to do could be done," Ryan says.

Adair organized Ryan's work and helped her send it out. "She said, 'OK, we're going to send out 100 packets, and we're going to hope for one success.'?" Even those odds proved tough, so Adair got a group of friends together to self-publish Ryan's first book, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, in 1983. Finally, a year later Ryan published two poems in Poetry magazine, and the following year her first small-press book, Strangely Marked Metal.

Though sometimes overreaching, Ryan's early poems are recognizably hers. From the beginning she deployed short, fractured lines of wordplay and sharp, angular movement. She wasn't afraid to rhyme, or to stick the rhyme midline ("Babel is kinder/than this reminder, this"). She was more likely to find inspiration in Ripley's Believe It or Not! than in her own life.

Strangely Marked Metal received no attention. "It was just disheartening," Ryan says. She tried to get a more prominent publisher, but without luck. Finally she published another small-press book, assuming that it too would be lost to obscurity. It did get a little more attention, and she published her third collection with a major trade house, but she was still dispirited. She closed her third book, Flamingo Watching, with a telling poem, "Turtle." It ends:

She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things.

All the time, though, her poems were becoming stronger, lighter, and more cunning, like spider webs. And reviewers, in fact, were starting to notice. In the late '90s, Dana Gioia, who later became chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote that "over the past five years no new poet has so deeply impressed me with her imaginative flair or originality as Kay Ryan." (He noted that Ryan had been writing for too long to be considered really "new," but she was new to the mainstream.) She published Elephant Rocks, Say Uncle, and The Niagara River in quicker succession, and her new and selected poems, The Best of It, comes out next spring. She has been laureled with awards and grants, including the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation. Now, as the 16th laureate—a position previously held by Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Brodsky, Louise Glück, and others—the poet whose first work was self-published commands poetry's biggest platform.

Her poems, though, remain surprising and fresh, keeping the reader slightly off-kilter. Ryan writes by taking a thread of thought—usually the title—and then unspooling it. "I have no idea where it's really going to go," she says. "I have some ambition. But I have to hope that ambition will be ambushed." She likes to play with puns and idioms ("quid pro crow," say); to invert expectations ("I enjoy an accumulating/faith in weak forces"); to stitch together science, high and low diction, whatever flits across her mind. Even her rhyme is "recombinant." The effect is delightful and weird, like language playing a game of telephone with itself. As the poems swerve between images and ideas, meaning and sound, white space and the black ink of a line—between surface action and metaphorical depths—the attentive reader will see a glimmer of secret life. At one point Ryan described the words in a poem as a loose net around a swimming fish, invisible except in the flash of its turn. The fish—the secret life—is at once caught and free. "You have to feel that you haven't solved" a poem, she explains. "It refreshes you to return to it. That's a very strange thing about a poem." It can be frustrating, of course, to finish reading and realize you've just begun. Poetry is resistant. In a culture in which the "take-away" is paramount, poetry gives nothing away. You have to look past whatever the poem seems "about" to see what it is. "It's what we can't/know that interests/us," Ryan writes in "Absences and Breaks."