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A review by jenna_le
Erratic Facts by Kay Ryan
4.0
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...