Thursday, November 13, 2008

O'Rourke on Ryan

By Ted Burke


Meghan O'Rourke offers a credible description and defense of our new Poet Laureate, but as much as I enjoy the reasoning, I find the idea of Kay Ryan , Poet, more interesting than Kay Ryan's poetry. I'm not a fan of ornate language, since most poets do it badly, even those who are praised for it as a default remark, including our drifting poet Laureate Derek Walcott--if similes were empty wine bottles , he'd have drunk himself to death--but I would like some elegance and lift in the briefer lines as well, some polish besides the formulations Ryan offers us from the page.

The poems are lean, yes, clever with their internal rhymes, slants, conceits and all the rest, but there isn't the stamp of a personality to enliven these dry dictations. She is compared to Dickinson rather excessively, since Ryan's aim is to move toward a point she's cutting through the underbrush toward; she seems to know before hand what she's driving at, and for me so much of what she does amounts to seeing a neighbor park their car in the same spot for years after the work day is over.

Dickinson's minimalism is a slippier sort of stream to wade into; her habit was to meet herself coming the other way while on an investigation of a nuance; she contained and expressed her own contradicting assertions. Dickinson is the more interesting poet for all the material she implies, suggest, touches up with the minimum of space her poems consume; the dashes and asides still bother us, provoke discussion. Ryan is of the generation that thinks poetry has to have a point to make , a purpose to reaffirm. This makes her work, finally, fatally forgettable.





No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated due to spam. But commentaries, opinions and other remarks about the posts are always welcome! I apologize for the inconvenience.