Kay Ryan’s tarot cards, the return of the rhyme, Mennonite matriarchs, Mao’s poems, Women’s Work, and Blago’s versification
The past year will be called a million things—many of them bad, many of them inspired by the rapid evaporation of huge sums of money—but in poetry it was a banner year for women writers. Incidentally, it seems like a theme, and it’s about time: for all the supposed liberal-mindedness of artists and the arts, it turns out members of the fairer sex still, in 2008, got paid less for a poem or a painting or a novel than their testosterone-juiced counterparts.
For those unaware anyone got paid anything for poetry, there are other, more propitious signs of the breaking down of barriers: Kay Ryan, for instance, assumed the post of poet laureate in July. She takes office at the height of her powers, her magnifying glass of a sensibility producing one blistering, slant-rhymed gem after another. Here’s one from a book she did with San Francisco artist Tucker Nichols:
Blandeur
If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.
Ryan, an enthusiastic and long-time Californian, describes in her winter 2008 Paris Review interview the way she resisted embracing poetry in her youth, the way she rode a bicycle across the country to help her make up her mind about being a writer, and the way tarot cards propelled her into an understanding she “could write about anything—even love if required—and retain the illusion of not being exposed.”
Ryan is unabashedly lyrical, feeding off the succulence of the rhyme—in her interview she says, “when I started writing nobody rhymed, it was in utter disrepute”—and she’s part of a larger current. Mennonite matriarch Jean Janzen published the lyrical Paper House—“In a blue room / the poet’s pen / rides the air, / his hand poised / to mark the scroll / unrolled before him / like a desert”—and Katie Ford, winner of a 2008 Lannan Fellowship worth $100,000, published Colosseum, a book full of frank weather and tight scenes of flood and fury in New Orleans—“if you respect the dead / and recall where they died / by this time tomorrow / there will be nowhere to walk.”
Grace Paley left us in 2007 at the age of 84, but in 2008 her final collection, Fidelity, completed on her deathbed, hit the shelves. “It is possible,” she writes in “Sisters,” “to live in this world at an absolute minimum / loving brainy sexual energetic redeemed.” And it wasn’t all women. There were treats from the young studs as well. Cyrus Console published his brilliant debut, a book of dense, magnetic prose poems. “When I first saw the need for a study of this kind,” he begins, “I was living with my brother just out of sight from the house, in the past. I suppose we were waiting for Black Monday. There were comets in the air. It was beautiful over Libya and beautiful over Chernobyl.”
New work aside, 2008 proved rich in reprints as well. For the history books, the University of California trotted out The Poems of Mao Zedong, translated by Willis Barnstone. Mao’s poems are stiff and seem too intent on making points, but they were heralded by Richard Nixon (the famous poetry critic) as “very beautiful.” Actually, the UC press was on a roll: George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers fills out and, to a degree, revives the legacy of one the last century’s most ethically-committed and politically-active poets, a man who gave up writing for two decades to take up the fight for social justice. But the reprint to grab, if you only grab one, is Thomas James’s Letters to a Stranger, first published in 1973 and rereleased in 2008 by Graywolf. After publishing this award-winning book, his only one, James did what poets do: he killed himself. He was twenty-seven. “I have been thinking of the son / I would like to have,” he writes in the title poem. “The leaves have all gone yellow / Overnight, wrinkling like hands.”
Concerned at the underrepresentation of women in poetry anthologies, Amy Wack compiled a stellar collection herself, filling it with verse by 271 contributors and calling it Women’s Work. Graywolf gave poets in the United States a much-needed view into what’s bubbling up in Europe: New European Poets includes brilliant work by writers from Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, and pretty much the whole of Western Europe. The Summer 2008 Alaska Quarterly Review, in an issue guest edited by Jane Hirshfield (and dedicated to Grace Paley) assembled the strongest collection of contemporary poems in a journal in years. In addition to work by Kay Ryan and Katie Ford, there was verse by Ilya Kaminsky, Jack Gilbert, Robert Pinsky, Linda Pastan, W.S. Merwin, Maxine Kumin, Henri Cole, and a host of others.
And of course there was the annual litany of honors too numerous and boring to fully detail here. A few mentions, though: Louis Gluck, judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (the prize once bestowed on John Ashbery and Bob Hass, among many others, and famously denied Sylvia Plath) crowned Arda Collins’s It Is Daylight the 2008 winner. Tupelo press gave its coveted first book prize to Megan Snyder-Camp of Seattle for The Forest of Sure Things and the National Endowment for the Arts gave away a lot of money, again. Top honors, however, go to Elizabeth Alexander, selected as Obama’s inaugural poet—Alexander, by the way, is another woman who likes to flirt in and out of rhyme. In “Black Poets Talk about the Dead,” she writes:
“Like Toni,” he said,
“who came plain as day
to my dream last night
in a gangster beret,
tangerine-colored suit,
thigh-high go-go boots,
she tipped that brim and said,
How ya like me now?
Speaking of gab, there was no shortage of talk in 2008. The conversation pulsed. Opinions were hashed. Positions were taken. The Stranger asked why Seattle supports bad poetry, Gwenyth Lewis, first National Poet of Wales, argued against sadness as a prerequisite to good poem-making, and Paul Muldoon, poetry editor at the New Yorker, said “making sense” is the challenge for poets today. It’s producing a circus of linguistic nonsense, he offers, that’s easy. Good point. Meanwhile, Blago quoted Kipling and—a few days ago—Tennyson (Ulysses, even), to bolster his case, promising “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Well, what can we say? His taste is a bit formal, but the Tennyson was nice.
-E.P.
Correspondent
San Francisco
January 2009
