Synthesizing Gravity Read online

  ALSO BY KAY RYAN

  Erratic Facts

  The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

  The Jam Jar Lifeboat and Other Novelties Exposed

  The Niagara River

  Say Uncle

  Elephant Rocks

  Flamingo Watching

  Strangely Marked Metal

  Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends

  SYNTHESIZING GRAVITY

  Selected Prose

  KAY RYAN

  WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

  Edited and with an Introduction

  by Christian Wiman

  Copyright © 2020 by Kay Ryan

  Introduction copyright © 2020 by Christian Wiman

  Cover design by Becca Fox Design

  Front cover photograph ″ David Goldes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  First Grove Atlantic edition: April 2020

  This book is set in 12-point Bembo

  by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4818-6

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4819-3

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  Credits

  The following pieces first appeared in these publications:

  “A Consideration of Poetry” originally appeared in Poetry, May 2006

  “Derichment” originally appeared in The Ruminator Review, Summer 2000

  “I go to AWP” originally appeared in Poetry, July/August 2005

  “Specks” originally appeared in Poetry, September 2013

  “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks” originally appeared as “Notes on the Danger of Keeping Notebooks” in Parnassus: Poetry In Review, Vol. 23, nos. 1 & 2, 1998

  “Do You Like It?” originally appeared in ZYZZYVA, Winter 1998

  “The Authority of Lightness,” a review of Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith, by Jack Barbera and William McBrien, originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, Winter 1990

  “Inedible Melons,” a review of The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman, originally appeared in Yale Review, Spring 2004

  “Fidget and Gnash,” a review of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. Bonnie Costello, originally appeared in Boston Review, Summer 1998

  “I Demand to Speak With God,” a review of The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen, originally appeared in Poetry, September 2007

  “Wang-Pang-Woo-Poo-Woof-Woof,” a review of Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens, originally appeared in Boston Review, Summer 1997

  “The Trail of the Hunted Wolf,” a review of Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century, by Solomon Volkov, translated by Marian Schwarz, originally appeared in The Hungry Mind Review, Fall 1998

  “Only Doubts,” a review of This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges, originally appeared as “Profound Lightness” in The Threepenny Review, Winter 2003

  “Flying,” a review of An American Childhood by Annie Dillard originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, Summer 1988

  “The Abrasion of Loneliness” is from the author’s personal archive

  “On a Poem by Hopkins” is from the author’s personal archive

  “Radiantly Indefensible” is from the author’s personal archive

  “All Love All Beauty” is from the author’s personal archive

  “On a Poem by Dickinson” is from the author’s personal archive

  “No Time for Anything but Repetition” is from the author’s personal archive

  “The End of the Party” is from the author’s personal archive

  “All the Nothing” is from the author’s personal archive

  “Listening to Williams,” written in response to an archival recording of William Carlos Williams’s 1954 reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y, was originally published online as part of the Center’s 75 at 75 anniversary celebration, 2013

  “Con and Pro,” originally published as “Antagonism: Walt Whitman” in Poetry, October 2004 and as “Enthusiasm: William Bronk” in Poetry, March 2006

  “The Double” originally appeared in Poetry, April 2005

  “Reading Before Breakfast” originally appeared in The Hungry Mind Review, Summer 1998

  “To Be Miniature Is to Be Swallowed by a Miniature Whale,” written as part of a symposium on The Miniature, originally published in The Threepenny Review, Spring 2016

  “Against Influence,” originally published as “Essay on Influence,” was written for the Centennial celebration of the Pulitzer Prizes and originally published online at pulitzer.org, February 2016

  “On Forgetting” was originally published as “Memory and Forgetting” in Speakeasy, Fall 2005

  “The Edges of Time,” written as an introduction to the poem “The Edges of Time,” originally published in “Poet’s Choice” column, The Washington Post, September 25, 2009

  “The Poet Takes a Walk” originally published as “Marin County, Sort Of” as a “The Poet Takes a Walk” feature in Poetry, November 2009

  “My House” was originally published in Freeman’s: Home, April 2017

  For Carol

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kay Ryan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Credits

  Dedication

  Introduction by Christian Wiman

  I

  A Consideration of Poetry

  Derichment

  I Go to AWP

  Specks

  Notes on the Danger of Notebooks

  Do You Like It?

  II

  The Authority of Lightness

  Inedible Melons

  Fidget and Gnash

  I Demand to Speak with God

  Wang-Pang-Woo-Poo-Woof-Woof

  The Trail of the Hunted Wolf

  Only Doubts

  Flying

  The Abrasion of Loneliness

  III

  On a Poem by Hopkins

  Radiantly Indefensible

  All Love All Beauty

  On a Poem by Dickinson

  No Time for Anything but Repetition

  The End of the Party

  All the Nothing

  Listening to Williams

  Con and Pro

  IV

  The Double

  Reading before Breakfast

  To Be Miniature Is to Be Swallowed by a Miniature Whale

  Against Influence

  On Forgetting

  The Edges of Time

  The Poet Takes a Walk

  My House

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  In C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce a few souls tra
vel from hell (on a bus, naturally) to heaven only to discover that everything is too heavy for them. Water is rock and apples are iron. A mere leaf is, for the unenlightened, unbudgeable. The book makes you crave the reality of this new world (which is the old world, naturally), makes you want to be one of the souls who can drink from its streams and savor its tastes. Kay Ryan is not religious, but I can’t help thinking that she and Lewis are in some way native to the same imagined place, a realm in which gravity and levity are vivid kin:

  Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast-iron manhole cover was dancing in its collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, occasionally producing a bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.

  That’s from the first page of “A Consideration of Poetry,” the first essay in this volume, and it has “much to say” about all that follows. From that miraculous manhole cover at the outset, to the tour of the house that is a tour of the mind at the end, this book achieves a kind of “sustained impossibility,” to use a phrase that Ryan herself uses to describe the work of Marianne Moore. Ryan has a way of tweezering immensities, so that you can see, as in a three-dimensional diagram, entire bodies of work before the mind’s eye. She is bristly and funny and contradictory: against notebooks, against influence, against glut, and then—suddenly, savingly—against being against: “If we are not compelled to submit in some way to a poem it cannot change us.” The economy of the book belies its range. Aside from the criticism, there are quick hits on memory and forgetting, the audience for poetry, the miniature in art. There is a freestanding and freewheeling piece in which she goes, like Samuel Johnson on safari, to the largest writers’ conference in the country. There’s even a conversion (to poetry, naturally). A few of these essays have never been seen before and arrived at my door in pencil, each without a word crossed out and bearing such boreal clarity and crisp precisions that I found myself pausing to write things down. One could make a large commonplace book out of this small collection of uncommon essays:

  Embarrassment at being human may be a deeper provocation to artistic production than we usually think.

  When Gertrude Stein was at last after so many years of fruitful absence touring and lecturing in the United States, she was a popular sensation in that she was of a piece, a figure round and burrless as a ball, solid, simple, capable of being perfectly, not partially, misunderstood.

  It’s the strangest thing; the poem is a trap—that is a release. It’s a small door to a room full of gold that we can have any time we go through the door, but that we can’t take away.”

  There must be a crack in the poet of some sort. It has to be deep, privately potent, and unmendable—and the poet must forever try to mend it.

  There is something repellent in all this. But I am convinced that for a poet to be great we must find ourselves repelled by some part of the poet’s work. There is a permanent time that poetry lets us into. There are doors in all the centuries, feeding into this permanent time.

  She could get high C out of a potato.

  Notice the metaphors. They crackle through practically every paragraph. Indeed Ryan’s mind adverts to metaphor so readily some might think it a tic. But metaphor is where the creative imagination reveals its furthest capacities. And its kinship with what is beyond its capacities. This is a spiritual assertion, though to understand it fully one might have to resist that adjective. “It is an elegant paradox that close application to the physical somehow does release the mind from the physical,” Ryan writes of Moore. And of Stevie Smith: “The most beautiful thoughts and feelings can barely settle or they break us. We can’t endure more than the briefest visitations. That’s the cruel fact. Almost every writer almost always crushes her own work under the weight of thoughts and feelings.”

  But “thoughts and feelings” are the whole point of poetry in the end, as Ryan well knows. She emphasizes the reserve of poetry so often, the “chillifier” of form that emotion must go through to become art, that you might not notice when the first few drips of real feeling infuse into the blood—then suddenly it’s everywhere. Similarly, she is so insistently diminutive that you’re shocked to find the cosmos crammed through the eye of a needle. (“One reason we’re so fascinated by the tiniest pinholes is that we know we’re going to have to go through the tiniest pinhole.”) Her amiable porcupine pose is not a pose, exactly, but an adaptive technique. She is gregarious but allergic to agreement, in love with form but contemptuous of systems, acidically skeptical but as devoted to her own intuition as any mystic. “I will go so far as to hazard that blundering might be generative,” she says in a discussion of a little-known poem by Emily Dickinson, “meaning that rooting around in a haystack long and fruitlessly enough could conceivably breed a needle.” Do I need to point out the genius of “breed” here? That a certain amount of blundering about in an uneven but (now) unforgettable poem has bred a genuine insight, the pith and proof of which is sound itself? Probably not. One of the great charms of Ryan’s mind is that she assumes her readers will keep up with her.

  Speed is in fact a word she returns to when describing what she most values in poetry. It is important to understand what she means by this. It is not mere “quickness” or wit, and it has nothing to do with the surface associativeness that characterizes much contemporary poetry. There is nothing nervous about it. “We must be less in love with foreground if we want to see far,” she writes, and that’s the chief sensation I get from her thinking: vast distances covered with great speed. In her own poems, actually, this action isn’t so much velocity as simultaneity, a kind of quantum thought. Images and ideas seem less sequential than instantaneous, as if reality were neural. Prose obeys different laws, though there are many passages in this book that will make you wonder just how clearly that line can be drawn.

  The subjects of Ryan’s critical attention are for the most part unsurprising. She might pause to swat the blob of Walt Whitman, and her takes on Annie Dillard and Marilynne Robinson (this one was in pencil) are bracing. Mostly, though, her critical gaze is like her poetic one: fixed and distant. She looks at poets who are like her in some way, and she looks, ever so lightly, hard. This kind of sympathetic criticism turns out to be a much more difficult enterprise than if she were surveying a wide range of writers. In that instance, one might appreciate (or not) her taste. But when like turns to like, and when the subjects are already so barnacled with laurels, the expectations become much greater. She’d better say something truly original about Marianne Moore, because otherwise what’s the point. So she does: “It takes a deep security to endure a life of such endless lightness, tangled delicacy, nearly mad fealty to serial perfections, almost comic probity.” One could memorize that line and be fortified against despair. And this miraculous essay ends: “Hers is a genius so perfectly self-tuned that we find ourselves laughing, one of the body’s natural responses to shock.”

  That sentence is itself so perfectly self-tuned that I hesitate to point it out. It is a truism to say that a poet’s criticism is always implicitly defensive, one part microscope and one part mirror. In fact it is true, or at least meaningful, only of great poets, whose mirrors matter. Of course one could say that Ryan’s poems, along with Moore’s, cheer and chill in equal measure. They do not ask you to love them. They do not want to “change your life.” It is possible that you will love them and they will change your life, but that is on the other side of their primary purpose. What is that purpose, in Ryan’s case? I would say it is to light the space between mind and world. To light, and thereby lighten, the space between mind and world. To lighten, and thereby lessen, the space between mind and world.

  This ambition, which of course is not an “ambition” but a genetic gift and/or glitch, a compulsion of the blood, infor
ms everything she says in the prose, though the thinking is so sprightly that it’s easy to miss the canyons she’s ambling over, cartoonlike, by not looking down. When she says, in a piece about taking a walk, that she has an odd but prodigious gift for matching distant bits of trash along the road, we hardly notice the immense intellectual and even metaphysical dimensions of this perception, even though she makes it for us: “The brain anticipates significance; it doesn’t know which edge may in fifty yards knit to which other edge, so everything is held, charged with a subliminal glitter along its raw sides.”

  Subliminal glitter. That’s more than a great phrase. If the shards of the world (and our experience) are charged with a subliminal glitter, if mind and matter seem to communicate with each other, seem so atomically entwined that the one might breed a needle in the other, then what does this say about our relationship to the world? Might that crack that runs through the consciousness of the poet, which is what drives one to write in the first place, and the unity of all creation, which every poem both intuits and pursues, be one day reconciled? Maybe reality really is neural? On the other hand, why muse on such mysteries when your brain can activate the thing itself? You might as well drop these imponderables on Ariel.

  The mind (and its chief system, language) is Ryan’s “flood subject,” just as Emily Dickinson’s was immortality and Stevie Smith’s was, as Ryan tells us, “the cheering thought of suicide.” I write that sentence and feel it to be true—yet I pause. If the mind is Ryan’s flood subject, and if the mind’s relation to the world is as I have sketched it, then there is an implicit rift under the flood. (“There must be a crack in the poet of some sort… .”) The rift is loneliness. It’s so narrow you often miss it under the levity and dexterity, and yet so deep that, just as with Dickinson (though hers isn’t hidden), it can make sustained exposure to the work difficult and not at all without risk. I want to be very precise here. This is not the sort of loneliness a biography will ever explain, the sort that is defined by relationships and time. That kind of loneliness is, even if it is not answered, answerable. When Ryan writes (of Wallace Stevens) that “loneliness is not the grief for poets that it is for others,” it’s this kind of loneliness she’s talking about. But the polar note in her own poems is closer to Lear’s lonely “nevers” (one of her most devastating poems is called “The First of Never”) and is indeed the grief for poets that it is for others. This note is not at all prominent in Ryan’s work, is in fact often barely perceptible, but it underlies her entire vision, and without it the poems would not have the glinting depths they do.