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3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
fast-paced
I like Ryan's haiku-esque sensibility: her poems are longer than haiku, but she uses consistently short line lengths and internal rhymes to achieve a haiku's sense of breath-brief transience, structure, and formal discipline. If you haven't read Ryan before, you might wonder whether her use of the same formal constraints again and again gets boring over time, but strangely it doesn't, no more than Basho's repeated use of the 5-7-5 form does.
In poems so short, so exposed, it'd be difficult to hide any fact-fudging, any unearned pretension -- poems shaped like these seem almost constitutionally unable to hide a lie any more than a clearly written mathematical proof can, and this sets the terms for an intensely honest meeting of minds between the writer and the reader. In fact, I read an interview with Ryan in Poets & Writers magazine last year where she tells of how she discarded a seemingly perfectly good poem she wrote about trees when she realized she had gotten one of her facts about botany wrong: you've got to respect such rigorous fidelity to an external standard. But this anecdote also tells you something else about Ryan's poems: how tightly wedded to a single felicitous concept or idea each poem is, such that the poem could be argued to fall apart if the concept does.
Ryan writes poems about concepts drawn from science -- say, the chirality of molecules ("Imagine an / inversion as / simple as socks: / putting your hand / into the toe of / yourself and / pulling") or the mitosis of cells ("there's no sense / that it hurts, but / why wouldn't it.... In / which event / an organism's / asked to... put out / the burning tent / and stay inside") -- with a remarkable purity of attention: there are no self-conscious declarations here of the "Look at me, looking at things!" kind, just the things themselves.
But Ryan also observes ordinary real-world things with glorious precision, down to the nanosecond, the nanometer:
The first trickle
of water down
a dry ditch stretches
like the paw
of a cat, slightly
tucked at the front....
Ryan slows down mundane moments, stretching them out like taffy, delicately, without letting them snap, until they are filled with wonder again. But her poetic gift also lets her do the reverse with seemingly equal facility -- that is, speed up time, as in "Blast," a poem about an explosion:
...This
must have happened
many times before,
we must suppose.
Almost a pulse
if we could speed
it up...
It's a truly gifted mind that can see a pulse in an explosion -- that is, see a pattern in what seems at first to be an egregious, once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe -- just as clearly as it can see unique happenings worthy of celebration or mourning in every recurrence of a frequent periodical event. I think this is how Ryan earns the license to play fast and loose with abstractions the way she does -- because in each generality she sees a particularity, with color, personality, and emotional texture:
Even a pin
set on a
memory table
falls through.
A bare wood
kitchen table
with square legs
kicked yellow
and blue from
painted chairs
pushed in
for thirty years...
In poems so short, so exposed, it'd be difficult to hide any fact-fudging, any unearned pretension -- poems shaped like these seem almost constitutionally unable to hide a lie any more than a clearly written mathematical proof can, and this sets the terms for an intensely honest meeting of minds between the writer and the reader. In fact, I read an interview with Ryan in Poets & Writers magazine last year where she tells of how she discarded a seemingly perfectly good poem she wrote about trees when she realized she had gotten one of her facts about botany wrong: you've got to respect such rigorous fidelity to an external standard. But this anecdote also tells you something else about Ryan's poems: how tightly wedded to a single felicitous concept or idea each poem is, such that the poem could be argued to fall apart if the concept does.
Ryan writes poems about concepts drawn from science -- say, the chirality of molecules ("Imagine an / inversion as / simple as socks: / putting your hand / into the toe of / yourself and / pulling") or the mitosis of cells ("there's no sense / that it hurts, but / why wouldn't it.... In / which event / an organism's / asked to... put out / the burning tent / and stay inside") -- with a remarkable purity of attention: there are no self-conscious declarations here of the "Look at me, looking at things!" kind, just the things themselves.
But Ryan also observes ordinary real-world things with glorious precision, down to the nanosecond, the nanometer:
The first trickle
of water down
a dry ditch stretches
like the paw
of a cat, slightly
tucked at the front....
Ryan slows down mundane moments, stretching them out like taffy, delicately, without letting them snap, until they are filled with wonder again. But her poetic gift also lets her do the reverse with seemingly equal facility -- that is, speed up time, as in "Blast," a poem about an explosion:
...This
must have happened
many times before,
we must suppose.
Almost a pulse
if we could speed
it up...
It's a truly gifted mind that can see a pulse in an explosion -- that is, see a pattern in what seems at first to be an egregious, once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe -- just as clearly as it can see unique happenings worthy of celebration or mourning in every recurrence of a frequent periodical event. I think this is how Ryan earns the license to play fast and loose with abstractions the way she does -- because in each generality she sees a particularity, with color, personality, and emotional texture:
Even a pin
set on a
memory table
falls through.
A bare wood
kitchen table
with square legs
kicked yellow
and blue from
painted chairs
pushed in
for thirty years...
It was taking longer than usual for me to start connecting with the little poetic diamond shards collected here, but about 1/3 of the way in the captivating admixture of wit, wryness, & endlessly unexpected images & turns of phrase I've come to expect from Ryan's work sparkled as brightly as ever. Always a pleasure.
We are held / as in a carton / if someone / loves us. / It's a pity / only loss / proves this"
We are held / as in a carton / if someone / loves us. / It's a pity / only loss / proves this"
I really wasn't a fan of most of these poems, but I like this one:
"As if engine parts could be wrenched out at random and the car would still start and sound even, hearts can go with chambers broken open."
"As if engine parts could be wrenched out at random and the car would still start and sound even, hearts can go with chambers broken open."
Erratic Facts has a unique style, form, and tone that get to the point of the language-project that Kay Ryan is playing. At times the new space she's carved with language finds its perfect pitch and the poems land exquisitely.
mysterious
fast-paced
The first third was definitely stronger than the rest (except for the last and title poem). I enjoyed it--spent my time reading it leisurely, going back and rereading every time I opened it, etc. The poems are accessible and meaningful, but I'm quite glad to have borrowed my copy rather than paying for it.
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I put "Eggs" (p. 59) on the cards we handed out at the memorial picnic for my husband in 2022, but almost all the poems are about grief. Profound miniatures without an extra word, whittled into tiny perfect statues from a vast piece of wood, Ryan's poems are always brilliant. In this collection, a different poem strikes me each time as I progress in my own idiosyncratic grief.
Struck Tree
You could start
to think a struck
tree's new leaves
from up in the
good part would
turn out halves,
but you have to
laugh at yourself;
loss doesn't get
into the subsets
of absolutely
everything.
(p. 62)
Struck Tree
You could start
to think a struck
tree's new leaves
from up in the
good part would
turn out halves,
but you have to
laugh at yourself;
loss doesn't get
into the subsets
of absolutely
everything.
(p. 62)