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.”
[...]
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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I am very interested in this loose net around the swimming fish. Some of my questions: Where do we place ourselves as the writers of these poems? Where do we place ourselves as the poems’ readers? And what about the water in which is all occurs?
I appreciate the simultaneous concreteness and elusiveness of this image, the space we have to visualize from inside and outside of the loose net, and the space the fish has to move and breathe.
The value of poetry to me has always been that from writing and also from reading a poem, the gleaning of the ideas, the “meanings,” which begin or seem apparent on the surface. Still, when the reader extends a little or excavates, s/he finds the poem opening up its many meanings. Even or especially when the images a poet uses are so vivid that a reader can smell it and hone in closely on its texture, there’s still more than the literal reading of the image itself.
In Marlon Hom’s graduate seminar on Asian American Literature, I read deep into Frances Chung’s New York Chinatown poems in the first section of Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple. Knowing that Chung wrote highly imagistic poems, I started to realize that every single object in each of her poems was dense and busting at the seams with so many meanings. One of my colleagues asked me, as a reader, how do you know when to stop reading into these objects. I responded that when you feel like you have exhausted all the meaning you can out of each object; I should have added that we must weigh those against the poetic voice and poem’s tone, and its numerous other (inanimate) objects and (living) actors.
For example, in one of Chung’s poems, there is a broken NY Chinatown payphone covered or decorated with a very brightly colored pagoda; there are American tourists marveling at it and taking so many photographs of it, while pushing the non-English speaking Chinatown residents and workers off the sidewalks and into the narrow space between sidewalk and street. So, someone tell me then, what’s going on between the tourists, the Chinatown residents and workers, the narrow space between street and sidewalk, and this broken payphone in the pagoda.
In addition to the obvious marginalization of non-English speaking Chinatown residents in favor of inanimate exotica, and the nonexistent or broken system of communication between the non-English speaking Chinatown residents and the American tourists, I took it some steps further, by talking about broken payphone in relation to the isolation of the Chinatown residents from the places from which they migrated and the families they left behind, as Chung discussed throughout the body of her interconnected poems. Their isolation itself becomes a spectacle.
I think the above is a good example of the loose net around the swimming fish.
Finally, as for the immediate gratification for which Collins implicitly advocates in his use of the term “transparency,” I especially appreciate Ryan’s contradicting poetic statement: “It’s what we can’t/know that interests/us.”
I simply do not see why reading a poem cannot or should not be a mind-working/thinking experience, a spiritual experience. We look to the arts (or The Arts) to reflect upon our humanness, the importance of our human experience, the tough to say but necessary things about our human experience. Certainly, we are more complicated and aspiring than simply consenting to being told what to think, what to do, what to buy. That is what product advertisement is for, and even then, we appreciate clever or innovative advertisement. We wish to be more than simply consumers and demographic data. I keep thinking of why it is that for our rites of passage, celebrations, and gatherings, so many people seek out poetry for the words they believe poetic languages can convey more effectively and importantly than everyday language, academic language, political jargon, or legalese.
To end with Kay Ryan and Poet Laureate-ship, I understand that unlike Charles Simic, Ryan has decided to extend her term by one year. I am still not so clear on what exactly a Poet Laureate does in his/her office/position but I think these kinds of statements spoken and written by Ryan are a positive thing. “One of the main things that poetry does is make you feel looser and larger … It does offer us a kind of mental freedom.” Again, not dumbing down what we mean to say as poets, not pandering. Respecting a reader’s intelligence. Engaging in the rigor of writing, and encouraging the rigor of reading.
I’ll end with this tenet from an Imagist manifesto: “we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.” Even with the phrase, “render particulars exactly,” I believe that the specific and the concrete in a poem can open up multiple readings.
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Thank you for this. I’ve been writing for decades and it is always good when a new thought makes me see things/poems/poetry in a fresh way.
Sounds like Ryan is doing an awesome job as poet laureate– talking about poetry that way in Newsweek of all places! If she keeps talking this way, she could turn a whole lot of people onto reading poetry who might otherwise have been repelled by the ivory tower “poetry is good medicine for you, and tastes just as good” line of thinking, as well as by the various fake populist “everyman” movements. Thanks for highlighting these passages…
Andrew, thanks for your comment. Yes, I also think it’s good to widen our perspectives in/of poetry.
Pam, I like what you say re: presenting other ways of approaching poetry rather than the “ivory tower” versus the populist everyman. This seems to be the ongoing theme here: understanding poetry not via one extreme or the other.
Yes, Ryan’s way of talking about poetry seems to be accessible in a genuine way, as opposed to the fake populist mode which tries to make poetry seem accessible by dumbing it down and assuming that readers are just as dumb (which strangely enough amounts to a form of ungenuine condescension), or the ivory tower mode which can be just plain condescending. In contrast, Ryan’s way is respectful of the reader and tries to bridge the divide between general readers and the seeming “difficulty” of poetry by talking about the perceived reading difficulty as a kind of “practice” that most people can relate to or find analogies with in other life practices (e.g., yoga, meditation, running, surfing, etc.). She doesn’t dumb down the concept of poetry and she doesn’t assume that general readers are dumb either (which they aren’t). She opens up a channel of accessibility that may guide a lot of readers to become interested in approaching a poem for the sheer experience that they can get through the reading process, a kind of enlarging of the moment, a kind of stretching into an elusive, spiritual dimension.
This goes back to your point about how people look to poetry during times of major life passage (weddings, graduations, funerals, etc.) and what it is that people are looking for poetry to provide at these times. This I think is a great question to explore, and could strike at the heart of why poetry is significant for people and why people do actually *need* poetry to get through life.
Hi Pam, sorry for my delay in response. I like what you say about the practice of reading poetry and likening it to running, meditating, yoga, etc., that you get better at it over time and, indeed, with practice. It’s true that this kind of instant gratification culture makes it nearly impossible to encourage folks to engage art. Art, of course, is a discipline, that practitioners spend their lives working at.
I have to say again that I really appreciate your articulation of “fake populism,” and how this insults people’s intelligence.
Finally, how does the fact that people seem to need poetry at major rites of passage in their lives connect with the fact that art and poetry require work. I think it’s because those major rites of passage/transition are also not easy periods to live through, and poetry allows people the space to reflect upon profound ideas. Something like.