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| Poet's forgone private life |
Clark Merrefield
2008-07-24 |
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Poet Kay Ryan has led a quiet, regular life in Marin County for roughly three decades. She lies in bed and writes in her empty Fairfax home each weekday morning after her partner Carol Adair leaves for work. She sometimes buys pastries at Bookbeat and borrows books from the Fairfax Library. She works part-time as a remedial English teacher at the College of Marin.
But last Thursday Ryan's routines were upended when the Library of Congress announced her as the 2008-2009 United States poet laureate. The media, she said, have been hounding her ever since.
"You can imagine my life has been screwy, so I'm sandwiching you in between two other interviews," Ryan, 62, told the Point Reyes Light on Monday.
"I turned down two of the local television stations last Friday because I just didn't have time," she said. "I was on NPR yesterday. I was interviewed and photographed by The New York Times and The Washington Post."
The attention is a function of her new position, she said, which will include a reading at the Library of Congress on October 16 and carries a $35,000 stipend for the year. Ryan is the sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant and is the first woman to hold the post since Louise Gluck in 2003.
A new poet laureate is chosen yearly or semi-yearly by the librarian of congress, who is informed by a cadre of unofficial advisers such as poetry editors and critics. There is no shortlist for the post, no application or waiting list.
The evening of July 10, Ryan and Adair got back to Fairfax from the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado and found a message from James Hadley Billington, the librarian of congress, asking Ryan to call him at home. He forgot to leave his number, Ryan said, so she reached him at his office the next day. She had a hunch what he wanted to tell her.
"The running joke is, I thought, 'I don't have that many overdue library books,'" Ryan said.
"It was just hell trying to keep it a secret," she added. "I was popping."
The call from Billington was a complete surprise, Ryan said, capping what had been a largely anonymous career.
Articles and critics have called Ryan's poems "Bible verses for the worldly," as in a New York Times review of her 2005 collection, "The Niagara River: Poems," and "sly, dense, elliptical, and suggestive," as in an essay from the Winter 1998-1999 issue of The Dark Horse. There is apparently very little that critics, and the public at large, dislike about her work.
"She's a miniaturist, which doesn't mean that her work is small," said Neshama Franklin, a fan of Ryan's who lives in Bolinas and is a library aide at the Fairfax Library. "It shows that small stuff can yield so much, especially in this time of a combination of glut and scarcity."
Ryan's public rise began in 2004 when she won the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000. That same year she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and in 2005 she received the Gold Medal for poetry by the San Francisco Commonwealth Club. She has also won four Pushcart Prizes.
In taking over for incumbent poet laureate Charles Simic, Ryan will be entrusted to heighten poetry's role in national life and discourse.
"There's so many requests for her appearance," said Patricia Gray, coordinator of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. "She will just winnow through those and make her choices about where she's going to appear."
Typically, though, there are few official duties, allowing poets laureate time to pursue their own work.
Past poets laureate have introduced public poetry to airports, hotel rooms and supermarkets and have started poetry workshops for women at the Library of Congress.
How Ryan's usual life of quiet will fit in with her new public duties remains to be seen. She said she hasn't had time to think about how she will help promote poetry in America.
In an essay from the September 2007 issue of Poetry, in which Ryan reflects on a collection of Robert Frost's personal notes, she writes that early in Frost's career, "All he looked like was a bad chicken farmer. I was moved by what must have been an early note in which he says he's been 'accused of talking as if to an audience when I have none.'"
Ryan was also a bit of a late bloomer—she didn't begin writing seriously until age 30—and she draws parallels between Frost's lack of recognition early in his career and her own.
"Frost for so long was an institution in American culture but for a long time he just looked like a flat failure, and for a very long time I looked like a flat failure too," Ryan told the Light. "I didn't get a legitimate book published by anybody—but essentially myself a group of friends—until I was 40. I didn't have a poem in the New Yorker, which is a nice marker of some achievement, until I was 50. I felt like I could never ever get anywhere."
Now, it seems Kay Ryan has finally arrived—and then some.
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