Kay Ryan - Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose

Erratic Facts

The Best of It: New and Selected Poems

The Jam Jar Lifeboat and Other Novelties Exposed

The Niagara River

Say Uncle

Elephant Rocks

Flamingo Watching

Strangely Marked Metal

Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends

KAY RYAN

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

Edited and with an Introduction
by Christian Wiman

Copyright 2020 by Kay Ryan

Introduction copyright 2020 by Christian Wiman

Cover design by Becca Fox Design

Front cover photograph David Goldes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

First Grove Atlantic edition: April 2020

This book is set in 12-point Bembo

by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-4818-6

eISBN 978-0-8021-4819-3

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

The following pieces first appeared in these publications:

A Consideration of Poetry originally appeared in Poetry, May 2006

Derichment originally appeared in The Ruminator Review, Summer 2000

I go to AWP originally appeared in Poetry, July/August 2005

Specks originally appeared in Poetry, September 2013

Notes on the Danger of Notebooks originally appeared as Notes on the Danger of Keeping Notebooks in Parnassus: Poetry In Review, Vol. 23, nos. 1 & 2, 1998

Do You Like It? originally appeared in ZYZZYVA, Winter 1998

The Authority of Lightness, a review of Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith, by Jack Barbera and William McBrien, originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, Winter 1990

Inedible Melons, a review of The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman, originally appeared in Yale Review, Spring 2004

Fidget and Gnash, a review of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. Bonnie Costello, originally appeared in Boston Review, Summer 1998

I Demand to Speak With God, a review of The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen, originally appeared in Poetry, September 2007

Wang-Pang-Woo-Poo-Woof-Woof, a review of Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens, originally appeared in Boston Review, Summer 1997

The Trail of the Hunted Wolf, a review of Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poets Journey Through the Twentieth Century, by Solomon Volkov, translated by Marian Schwarz, originally appeared in The Hungry Mind Review, Fall 1998

Only Doubts, a review of This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges, originally appeared as Profound Lightness in The Threepenny Review, Winter 2003

Flying, a review of An American Childhood by Annie Dillard originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, Summer 1988

The Abrasion of Loneliness is from the authors personal archive

On a Poem by Hopkins is from the authors personal archive

Radiantly Indefensible is from the authors personal archive

All Love All Beauty is from the authors personal archive

On a Poem by Dickinson is from the authors personal archive

No Time for Anything but Repetition is from the authors personal archive

The End of the Party is from the authors personal archive

All the Nothing is from the authors personal archive

Listening to Williams, written in response to an archival recording of William Carlos Williamss 1954 reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y, was originally published online as part of the Centers 75 at 75 anniversary celebration, 2013

Con and Pro, originally published as Antagonism: Walt Whitman in Poetry, October 2004 and as Enthusiasm: William Bronk in Poetry, March 2006

The Double originally appeared in Poetry, April 2005

Reading Before Breakfast originally appeared in The Hungry Mind Review, Summer 1998

To Be Miniature Is to Be Swallowed by a Miniature Whale, written as part of a symposium on The Miniature, originally published in The Threepenny Review, Spring 2016

Against Influence, originally published as Essay on Influence, was written for the Centennial celebration of the Pulitzer Prizes and originally published online at pulitzer.org, February 2016

On Forgetting was originally published as Memory and Forgetting in Speakeasy, Fall 2005

The Edges of Time, written as an introduction to the poem The Edges of Time, originally published in Poets Choice column, The Washington Post, September 25, 2009

The Poet Takes a Walk originally published as Marin County, Sort Of as a The Poet Takes a Walk feature in Poetry, November 2009

My House was originally published in Freemans: Home, April 2017

For Carol

In C. S. Lewiss The Great Divorce a few souls travel from hell (on a bus, naturally) to heaven only to discover that everything is too heavy for them. Water is rock and apples are iron. A mere leaf is, for the unenlightened, unbudgeable. The book makes you crave the reality of this new world (which is the old world, naturally), makes you want to be one of the souls who can drink from its streams and savor its tastes. Kay Ryan is not religious, but I cant help thinking that she and Lewis are in some way native to the same imagined place, a realm in which gravity and levity are vivid kin:

Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast-iron manhole cover was dancing in its collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, occasionally producing a bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.

Thats from the first page of A Consideration of Poetry, the first essay in this volume, and it has much to say about all that follows. From that miraculous manhole cover at the outset, to the tour of the house that is a tour of the mind at the end, this book achieves a kind of sustained impossibility, to use a phrase that Ryan herself uses to describe the work of Marianne Moore. Ryan has a way of tweezering immensities, so that you can see, as in a three-dimensional diagram, entire bodies of work before the minds eye. She is bristly and funny and contradictory: against notebooks, against influence, against glut, and thensuddenly, savinglyagainst being against: