“The Miniature Arena of the Paragraph”: A Review of Kay Ryan’s Synthesizing Gravity
Kay Ryan’s collection of essays is as off-kilter as her poetry—and as essential for the long days of banality we all live through.
Review by Andrew Hendrixson
The mesh vest was safety-orange and several sizes too big, with silvery reflective stripes like fish scales gone iridescent in the sun. Someone had constructed a flag to match; a piece of remnant fabric attached to the end of a length of PVC pipe. I made minimum wage as a crossing guard. I’d assert my little flag into the road, bring cars to a stop, and hold court as children, and sometimes their accompanying parents, crossed to the other side of the street. Then I’d step back onto the sidewalk and life would commence. It wasn’t that it was difficult work so much as that it was almost unbearably not much of anything.
Some days and years do not come easy; Kay Ryan’s poetry is made for these. She is the patron saint of the hard won, the circuitous route, of the sea change at a glacial pace. Her first book of poems was self-published with the aid of friends and she wrote earnestly, albeit in relative obscurity, for years. Ryan served two terms as the United States Poet Laureate but spent the thirty-three years prior teaching remedial English at a community college where she was an adjunct instructor.
Ryan’s poetry isn’t readily quotable. Her poems do not comfort because they supplant pain with good cheer but because they create a buffer of empathy between the reader and the reader’s grief. I feel heard by her poems—less alone. Ryan knows that poems have a tremendous capacity for intimacy.
The architecture of her poems is compact. Hidden rhymes are delivered with deadpan succinctness and little flourish, but Ryan is not aloof or indifferent. She writes about the ostensibly banal, and somewhere, midway through a stanza about birds ascending from narrow ledges or turtles trudging through the grass we look up to find ourselves standing in expansive landscapes. Sometimes reading her poems is like tripping over your shoelaces. You hold your skinned knee and sit awhile and look up at the sky and find it dazzling and you are grateful that your dumb shoelaces facilitated the whole, nourishing event.
I spent a lot of time reading Kay Ryan poems while working at the crosswalk.
She is a self-identified non-joiner. You’ll never catch Ryan laboring over the villanelle, and mastering the rondeau prime is simply at odds with her contrarian nature. Ryan will shun the sestina for the one-stanza poem about a bird carrying a fish to its nest.
Synthesizing Gravity, a collection of her essays, is like her poetry in that both are admonitions to acute attention. She writes elsewhere that life can be too large and loud and unwieldy but that she can attend to the “miniature arena of the paragraph.” One gets the sense, though, that through the paragraph Ryan is also attending to the larger arena of a life. Her prose, as her poetry, feels not adjacent to life but squarely rooted in the middle of life. Ryan is incapable of the frivolity of rhapsodic musing and her writing bears the urgency of necessity.
Synthesizing Gravity reads like a field guide for writers, particularly those writers who are similarly unclubbable. Her prose evidences a humor and wit that is rarely found in her poetry.
In one essay, “I Go to AWP,” Ryan writes of attending the international writers’ conference after years of priding herself on being a person “who does not go to writers’ conferences.” Her days at AWP, or the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, are awash in logo-emblazoned tote bags (procured at the registration table) and elevator pitches, and perhaps most dreadful, days of densely packed panel discussions with titles like “Transgressive and Post-Confessional Narrative In Contemporary Poetry” and “Life After Your MFA.”
The conference, which she likens to a trip to Costco, “conspires to shame you out of any natural modesty you came in with.” During the conference’s keynote, she writes, “the room is all out of proportion with how poetry works. The pressure is all wrong. This place is right for revivals and mass conversions, for stars and demagogues. I don’t think I’d trust poetry that worked too well here.”
Amid the wit and self-deprecating humor threaded throughout Synthesizing Gravity we would do well not to miss that Ryan is, as my poet friend who is similarly unclubbable asserts, “making moral and ethical pronouncements. She is speaking wisdom that we will ignore to our own detriment.”
I spent a lot of time reading Kay Ryan poems while working at the crosswalk. Though I read them in the down minutes between escorting children across the street, my boss reprimanded me for doing so, said I wasn’t paying enough attention. I continued reading them anyway, pouring my disgruntlement through the understanding thresher of her stanzas. My civil disobedience in continuing to read them, as it seems the writing of Ryan’s poems are for her, was an act of self-preservation, not adjacent to life but squarely in the middle of it.
As soon as I saw the craft paper envelope with a hand-scrawled Northern California address I knew who it was from.
I once received a note from Kay Ryan. I was installing a large scale, multimedia art exhibition that was a collaboration with a museum and a local juvenile detention center. I wanted to place one of her poems on the museum wall, and the museum director requested copyright permission to do so. I’d used a substantial amount of my allotted budget and was thinking of ways to stretch the museum funds a bit further in order to secure her poem, writ large, on the museum wall. I didn’t know how these things worked. Would it require payment? Paperwork? I figured that was as good an excuse as any to write her directly and ask and should have known better than to try to curry her favor with a “professional” sounding tone and a typed letter.
As soon as I saw the craft paper envelope with a hand-scrawled Northern California address I knew who it was from. She wrote directly across the letter I’d typed and sent it back to me. Her writing was loopy and playful and not what I’d expected from the Poet Laureate.
“Yes, use the poem!” she wrote, “and please use it entirely free of charge, just put it on the wall. It sounds like an important project,” she affirmed, “I think it is going to be great.”
Andrew Hendrixson is a writer and artist in Seattle. He will begin doctoral studies in Theology at Duke Divinity School in the fall of 2021.
Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose was published by Grove Atlantic on April 14, 2020. You can purchase a copy on their website here.
