The Reluctant Poet Laureate

Take "No Names." It is a tiny poem, but there are deep plate tectonics at work. The poem describes a mountainous landscape beyond human reach, so remote that it resists even the human compulsion to conquer it on a map. But Ryan's images always operate on multiple levels. Here the "high places" are also the unknow-able regions of the human psyche—places beyond the reach of our understanding, "slick escarpments" that resist exploration. Every stressed word is like an ice ax, trying to gain purchase, while the alliterated "sh"—"sharp shapes, glacier-/scraped faces"—enacts the horrible sound of an object sliding down sheer ice. And yet it would be a mistake to see the poem only as an evocation of the struggling mind. The images are too powerful not to have some material reality. The poem itself is an invitation into those high places, the low-oxygen atmosphere above our understanding. To accept the invitation and really enter the poem is to make a demanding ascent—but a thrilling one, too.

"To read a poem is to be, I don't know, relieved of oneself to some degree," Ryan says. "One of the main things that poetry does is make you feel looser and larger … It does offer us a kind of mental freedom." No sooner has she said this, though, than she catches herself expounding on capital-P Poetry and begins to laugh. Mentioning an article in which the poet Philip Larkin discussed the "importance" of poetry, she cites his response: "My answer is no more valuable than if you asked a beaver about dams." As a friend noted on the back of her self-published volume: writing poetry is just what she does.

The poet laureate—officially called the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—has few prescribed duties. Some laureates stay for two terms, often to implement a project to revive interest in the art. Ryan's predecessor, Charles Simic, who thinks that the "death of poetry" refrain is exaggerated, decided against a second yearlong term. When he explained to The Believer magazine that the travel demands were too much, the interviewer asked, "So the post has an august reputation, but to actually be sitting in the office is a kind of harried, exhausting and distracting experience?" "Exactly," Simic answered.

Ryan, to her surprise, accepted an offer to take the position for a second term. Mostly, she says, she's doing it because Carol died. "I have to do something," she says. "I have to do something to keep me busy." She may not want to be Ambassador of Poetry, but she has another project in mind: promoting community colleges. "There's no glamour attached to attending one or being an instructor in one," Ryan says. "But the quality of education and the commitment to education in community colleges is remarkable."

It's clear that Ryan actually cares about the state of poetry, and that she wants to advance the general cause and enlarge the readership. But it's also clear that she has other things on her mind: Adair's garden, mountain biking. After so many years of vacillating between wanting attention and spurning it—wanting to write but resisting it, wanting to publish but fearing exposure, wanting a bigger audience but refusing to compromise—she is ambivalent about her success. Her audience has grown, and that is nice, but Adair is gone—and Adair was the audience that mattered. In the end, poetry needs only two caring people: one to write, and one to read.

"You write on the front edge of an experience, not in the midst of it," Ryan says to me at one point. A few years ago, before Adair was sick, Ryan wrote what now reads as an elegy. It is the rare poem of hers that features not animals or ideas or objects but people—or one person. (An elegy for her mother is another.) Ryan's "Ideal Audience," she wrote, isn't the world, "not scattered legions,/not a dozen from/a single region … "

Just
one free citizen—
maybe not alive
now even—who
will know with
exquisite gloom
that only we two
ever found this room.

© 2009