We can work on Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan, the sixteenth poet laureate of the United States of America, boasts to being a dynamic individual that incorporates a unique style of poetry writing that has captivated the interest of the reader worldwide.  The visually noticeable trait in most of her poetry is the shortness in length of the lines in her poems, which average between four to six syllables, and the overall shortness of her poems, which are not more than two pages. Spiegelman describes her work as “condense and expansive, razor-sharp and richly suggestive” (160), which indicates that despite the brevity in word use, the meaning is usually profound and rich in meaning. Fagan insists that her carefully calibrated words “create a heightened intimacy that encroaches stealthily on what is perhaps the most private of our own thoughts” (268).  Davis adds that her style of writing includes compressed syntax, hidden or internal rhymes and assonance which allows the reader to savor the beauty of the poem (278).  Ryan’s work is contemporary with a twist of medieval style writing as it is laced with bestiary which is an ancient form of poetry writing style (Davis, 279). In this essay Kay Ryan’s style of writing will be critically discussed through the analysis of her poems and the manifestation of her thematic focus prevalent throughout her writing.

Ryan’s poems are “lyrical and set up to solve problems or to consider ideas and often seem to follow Frost’s famous dictate to begin in delight and end in wisdom” (278).  When observing the poem “Tree Heart/True Heart”, one can identify the change in tone from the first few lines to the last few. In the first few lines the tone is almost neutral, without real indication of what the poem is about, but towards the end the wisdom of the poem is established when the subject of love is put into perspective when she mentions “… a real heart does not give way to spring” (Ryan, 12-14). Similarly in the poem “A Cat/A Future”, Ryan start the poem on a light note with the cat that “… can draw the blinds behind her eyes whenever she decides” (1-5). However, towards the end of the poem, the wisdom is shared when the cat and the future are likened to both be unobtrusively disconnected and yet present while “… still sitting there/doing nothing rude.” (10-11).  The poems are simple in text and a short read, however with the few words she manages to convey a thought provoking connotation that transcends the simplicity of the words positioned together.

A common theme amongst Ryan’s poems is the theme of nature marrying with human qualities or morality in the form of a figure of speech. She has a tendency to construct her poems with the figurative comparison of a natural component, whether animals, landscapes or plant, with abstract components of morality like thinking, grief, love and so forth. This is evident in the poem “Tree Heart/True Heart”, where trees and the season of spring are associated with the human quality of love, personifying the rings of a tree to the cycle of love and how every love-relationship cycle leaves a mark in you just like the rings in the bark of a tree. In “A Cat/A Future”, there is a simile between the cat and the concept of a future, which is an abstract phenomenon only acknowledged by humans. In Doubt, she uses the analogy of a hatching chick to metaphorically display the inadequacy of thinking negatively, once again using nature to convey a commonly human emotion. The link between nature and logic or human reasoning is a common theme used, which ultimately gives the reader a better perspective and understanding of the overall message she is transmitting in her poems.

“As a compendium of beasts, the medieval bestiary offered a natural history of animals usually accompanied by moral lesson, which in part addresses the animals characteristics” ( Davis 279). Ryan uses the ancient technique of bestiary in her writing to extract moral lessons from natural characteristics of animals and nature. She doesn’t only use the collaboration of nature and morals as a figure of speech but also to bring the reader to an understanding of a particular lesson. In the poem “A Cat/A Future”, she uses the cat’s unaltered eyes, even after putting the blinds behind her, as comparison to an imminent future, patiently waiting in the distance, inattentive, but present. It leaves room for the reader to contemplate her words in a personal way, bringing the reader to understand that the future is there, it is very much a reality but it is, for the time being, inactive. Ryan uses the same style in “Doubt” when she uses the hatching of an egg to put into perspective how doubt or pessimism can have negative outcomes on one with dreams. In the line “… doubt uses albumen at twice the rate of work…” (6-7), she indicates that the albumen is used by doubt to stop the egg from ever breaking through the shell of the egg, which in a moral lesson suggests that hardship acts as resistance to success and is fuelled by doubt if we let it gain power. The collaboration of nature and morals contribute to the unique contemporary style of writing, as it is a mixture of medieval style writing and unconventional brevity and simplistic wording that result in her interesting poems.

Figures of speech are very present in Ryan’s poems even with the brevity in words. She uses compressed syntax coupled with alliteration and assonance to further emphasize the poems. In “Tree Heart/True Heart” she uses assonance in the words “serially, annually, really, easily and willing”. The words placed in the middle of the sentences link the poem together and give the poem the illusion that the leaves of a tree are caught in a gentle breeze. “Doubt” re-creates the sound a chick makes with the constant repetition of the “ch” sound in the first three lines of the poem and similarly in “A Cat/A Future”, assonance is used with the words “behind, blinds, decides, eyes”.

Kay Ryan has translated her uniqueness in the form of literary art. She is unconventional and what seems to be a simple uncomplicated poem at face-value usually has a profound meaning that often leads to moral lessons masked by the simple wonders of nature.

Works Cited

Davis, Doris. “The Imaginative Nature of Kay Ryan’s Poetic Bestiary.” CEA Critic, vol. 77 no. 3, 2015, p. 278-283. Project MUSE,

Fagan, Deirdre. “Kay Ryan and Poetic Play.” CEA Critic, vol. 79 no. 3, 2017, p. 267-274. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cea.2017.0023.

Ryan, Kay. “Doubt”. Elephant Rocks. Grove Press, 1996, p2

Ryan, Kay. “A Cat/A Future”. Elephant Rocks. Grove Press, 1996, p56

Ryan, Kay. “ Tree Heart/True Heart”. The New Yorker. Available From: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/09/26/tree-hearttrue-heart, Accessed on: 21 November 2019

Spiegelman, Willard. “Kay Ryan’s Delicate Strength.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 88, no. 3, 2012, pp. 159–167. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26446847.

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