Archive for the 'kay ryan' Category

Repulsive Theory by Kay Ryan

February 16th, 2010 Comments(0)

I love Ryan’s language in this poem.

Repulsive Theory
By Kay Ryan

Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it’s got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending-off—
extending far beyond the personal,
I’m convinced—
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.

Houdini by Kay Ryan

September 12th, 2007 Comments(0)

For some reason we were talking about turtles tonight, and at least three of us had stories about turtles “escaping”, though we had no idea how. I decided that if I ever have a pet turtle, I’ll name him Houdini. This poem was in my file (after I found it at American Life in Poetry), so it seemed appropriate.

Houdini
By Kay Ryan

Each escape
involved some art,
some hokum, and
at least a brief
incomprehensible
exchange between
the man and metal
during which the
chains were not
so much broken
as he and they
blended. At the
end of each such
mix he had to
extract himself. It
was the hardest
part to get right
routinely: breaking
back into the
same Houdini.