Simplicity

Poems by Kay Ryan:

Waste

Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.

Blandeur

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

Felix Crow

Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule—
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out
his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
And every time
I like him
when we meet.

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.

Kay Ryan handles the short linebreak with such aplomb...and, it never falls into faux-WCW-ville or nouveau-Dickinson, with just one sentence stretched taut on the page. Every Ryan linebreak plays with the sound and lightness of her work, and emphasizes whatever word or phrase she wants us looking at: Look at /swirl set up by fending off--/ or /or the arabesque of thought?/ Every tiny line is a gem. I've had the pleasure of seeing her read--I encourage everyone to catch her if she comes to town. Kay is tremendously witty, and admits to wanting to be a standup comedian in her youth. (Read this for a taste of her wit: http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0705/comment_171211.html)

Your assignment: Keep it simple. Take on small idea, flesh it out, turn it over, and allow yourself to write something small and delightful. This will be a good exercise in linebreaks and in selectivity--every line should glow in its own way. And, don't be afraid to "play"--Ryan is always prepared to pen a pun or a catchy rhyme here or there, to add to the overall joy of each piece. I mean, she couldn't help herself from writing "Quid Pro Crow"--I'm sure she still chuckles when she reads it. (Note Ryan's careful use of punctuation--she never allows a linebreak to substitute for a dash, or comma, or period. Short linebreaks sometimes seem to "remove" the need for punctuation in the writer's mind, but this affects the reader greatly--with short linebreaks, it becomes ever more important to ensure your reader can follow your sentence structure, and thus the logic of each phrase. So, punctuate carefully, and don't shy away from throwing in the occasional "Dickinson Dash.")

~Dani