In refreshing contrast to Billy Collins’s recent statements on poetry and transparency, I have excerpted from the Newsweek article, “The Reluctant Poet Laureate,” Kay Ryan’s thoughts on poems and poetry:
At one point Ryan described the words in a poem as a loose net around a swimming fish, invisible except in the flash of its turn. The fish—the secret life—is at once caught and free. “You have to feel that you haven’t solved” a poem, she explains. “It refreshes you to return to it. That’s a very strange thing about a poem.” It can be frustrating, of course, to finish reading and realize you’ve just begun. Poetry is resistant. In a culture in which the “take-away” is paramount, poetry gives nothing away. You have to look past whatever the poem seems “about” to see what it is. “It’s what we can’t/know that interests/us,” Ryan writes in “Absences and Breaks.”
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The poem itself is an invitation into those high places, the low-oxygen atmosphere above our understanding. To accept the invitation and really enter the poem is to make a demanding ascent—but a thrilling one, too.
“To read a poem is to be, I don’t know, relieved of oneself to some degree,” Ryan says. “One of the main things that poetry does is make you feel looser and larger … It does offer us a kind of mental freedom.”
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Continue reading ‘Poetics: Poem as Loose Net Around a Swimming Fish’
