Kay Ryan's essays on poems, poets, and notebooks

Kay Ryan is a big deal. Seven books of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2004), U.S. Poet Laureate twice (2008-2010), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2011), a MacArthur Fellowship (2011). For all of that and even given my casual interest in poetry, I'd never heard of her until a month ago. My loss.

Synthesizing Gravity is a collection of Ryan's prose written over thirty years. It includes comments on poems and notes about poets including Philip Larkin, Robert Frost, Stevie Smith (a favorite), Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens (his letters), Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and William Bronk all of whom—except Bronk—I had heard. (Note to self: Look up work by William Bronk.) Her observations about other poets and their poems are thought-provoking and apt.

Here she is, for example, on Williams: "The poems feel blown around. Some of my favorites have nearly been blown away. We sense this terrific freshness and immediacy when we read Williams; we hear this arrestingly authentic, direct voice."

And here she is on a Larkin's "We Met at the End of the Party": "the wonderful power of this Larkin poem comes clearly and simply from its being exactly what Larkin would write, from its issuing from a single self. It is his envy of those who can live forward, his chronic sense of missing out, and his enviable technique . . ."

In addition to the substantial material on poetry, Synthesizing Gravity includes essays on attending Ryan's first (and last) Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference and—worth the price of admission by itself—"Notes on the Danger of Notebooks."

Writers are often advised to maintain a notebook. If you overhear a snatch of interesting conversation, write it down. If a random idea strikes you, write it down. If you have an unusual experience, write it down. Do it because, as Ryan begins her essay, "Almost everything is supposed to get away from us." But while it may be easy press a few blossoms in your notebook to keep for future reference, it's hobbling. "For the truth is that memories are indistinguishable from matter in that they can neither be created (despite the claims of vacation brochures) nor destroyed." 

When you create a poem or a story, she argues, the memories necessary will be there. But taking notes, "the actual physical act of taking them, along with the resulting document in our own words, lends them a spurious importance. It becomes important to us to determine what we meant by that note because we wrote it. We are very self-conscious and therefore we must be vigilant about what we let ourselves see of ourselves. We can see too much."

She quotes Milan Kundera, "We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image." (Try it, you diary-keepers.) "If a poet seeks to make or keep memories," Ryan writes, "how will she ever know which ones contain the true power, which would assert themselves on their own?"

This essay affected me more strongly than Ryan's others because, while I do maintain a journal, I've never kept the kind of writer's notebook recommended to record snatches of thought, bits of dialogue. And—validating Ryan's point—when I write I use whatever's available already in my brain: dialogue, concrete images, connections, whatever. If it's not in my brain, I use Google. 

And I'm going to stop feeling guilty because I don't carry a notebook.