The grandeur of blandeur
IN THE fall, Kay Ryan will become the nation's next poet laureate. She has been called an outsider who writes in clear, Emily Dickinsonian proportions. Ryan has so often been called quiet and private that this has become her public image. But one gets a better sense of her from her poetry.
There is Ryan the counterintuitive wordsmith, who named a poem "Blandeur." In it, she petitions for the comforts of plainness. She writes, "flatten / Eiger," referring to a rugged mountain peak in the Swiss Alps. She adds, "blanden / the Grand Canyon."
Ryan exemplifies the advice of her predecessor Charles Simic who said: Don't tell readers what they already know about life.
So her poem, "Star Block," ricochets off the drugstore familiarity of sun block: "There is no such thing / as star block. / We do not think of / locking out the light / of other galaxies. / It is light / so rinsed of impurities / (heat, for instance) / that it excites / no antibodies in us. / Yet people are / curiously soluble / in starlight."
A California resident, Ryan has written six poetry books and won major prizes, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
But her resume also reveals less than her words.
In a statement on the endowment's website she asks about lightness, ". . . . is there a sensation more exquisite than the feeling of having the burden of oneself borne off by a poem? The burden only, note; not the self. One's atoms are mysteriously distanced from one another. That is to say, one still has all one's own atoms, but for the moment they are not the trouble they were."
Ryan has not decided which projects she'll do as laureate. She could start by convincing people of the molecular benefits of reading poetry. 