Poet Laureate Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan is United State's 16th Poet Laureate. While she was a student at the University of California Los Angeles, her application to join the Poetry Club was 'rejected' because some disgruntled poets did not like her. Such 'humiliation' did not put her off writing. She did not want to become a poet, but was she not intrigued by rejection without realising it? She was heavily criticised for writing short or compressed poetry, and critics maintained that she wrote like Poets Emily Dickinson, and Marianne Moore. A lot of people were probably shocked by her current achievement as the numero uno poet in the U.S. The Remedial English college teacher who is in her early 60s started to write poems at the age of 19 after the death of her father. Her 2008-2009 salary is $35,000 plus $5,000 for travel and office expenses. She received $100,000 for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2004.
The Late Worm
The worms
which had been
thick are thin
upon the ground
now that it's gotten
later. They stick
against the path,
their pink chapped
and their inching
labored. It's a
matter of moisture
isn't it? Time, a
measure of wet,
shrinking, the
drier you get.
Source: Poetry (January 2008)
Repulsive Theory
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.
Source: Poetry (November 2003)
