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There's still so much to cover.

Unpacking the Suitcase: The Poetry of Kay Ryan

"A poem should act like an empty suitcase."      — Kay Ryan

The other night, I sat in the third row at our largest auditorium, listening to U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan read. Her measured, little poems could go by in an instant and you'd only be left with the sound of a few words on your tongue. She was aware of the audience's limited attention spans and the brevity of her poems, so she reread a few (as much, I think, for her benefit as our own). 

The man who introduced her, Atsuro Riley, also a poet, and clearly enamored of her words, used the word "thinky-ness" to describe her. Truly, this is a poet who needs facts to make the trip worthwhile. Bit by bit, she removes the contents of what we think we know of an old saying, an observation or a cliché, and replaces them with what she calls "recombinant rhymes" (slant rhymes and internal rhymes, not end rhymes), puns and deep insight. She giggles. She said "goody." She likes jokes and she likes Emily Dickinson.


Yes, I said those in the same sentence. This is a complicated poet, one that makes us work and wonder, even as we're getting excited about the simple fact that we're going on a journey.


Speaking of suitcases, Riley asked Ryan to end with this glorious poem: 

How Does a Guy Write So Many Wonderful Poems?

For tomorrow night's radio show, Charles Simic's poetry will be on my lips. Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell's magnificent boxes led me to Simic's poetry. The image above is one of Cornell's boxes. Dating from 1945, "Untitled (The Hotel Eden)," is assembled from various precious objects and found fragments. That's what Cornell was all about - collecting the unusual. Simic wrote a book of poems, loosely interpreting Cornell's boxes, and also collecting the unusual. That small book, Dime-Store Alchemy, published in 1992, is a delight.

Simic was deeply influenced by the absurd and dark days of his childhood. He grew up in Yugoslavia in the lap of World War II. His poems can be as bleak as a Russian winter, and yet sometimes they are giddy with strange things. This is the way of people who come through wars. They can have a strange sense of center. The poems thump in places you wouldn't expect, and touch in places they probably shouldn't. As he says in his newest book, Master of Disguises, "…Making everything very quiet in my room. / I thought I heard myself cry for a long, long time."

Tomorrow's "Audio Saucepan" radio show (April 17) is "The Headstrong Ways Episode.” I'll be reading the poems “Summer Storm” by Charles Simic (from Master of Disguises, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); "Flow Chart” by Elizabeth Willis (from Address, Wesleyan University Press); and “Trade Deficits” by G.C. Waldrep and John Gallager (from Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, BOA Editions, Ltd.).

There's a wonderful interview with Simic in The Paris Review. It's a good place to learn more.

"Audio Saucepan" is a one-hour weekly journey into poems, philosophical fragments and literary excerpts intermixed with music from across the globe. The show airs Sundays, 5-6PM (Mountain Time) on Santa Fe Public Radio KSFR 101.1FM with simultaneous access via the internet at www.ksfr.org. Please tune in!

What Does the Fish Have to Do With Anything?

Want a really good example of an object poem? Read Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish." Her descriptions are vivid, and her cold eye tells you everything you need to know about the caught fish. She describes his lip as "grim, wet, and weaponlike," and oh, how I love the tight, metallic sound of "the sun-cracked thwarts, / the oarlocks on their strings."

I share her marvelous poem with my students only after they've completed Steps 1 and 2 of the Object Poem exercise … and we discuss it, turning the words around and around, figuring out the "hooks" and the "catch," but most of all the "victory."


The Fish 
by Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Prompt 3: Write about an Everyday Thing

Close up photo of an Atlantic Halibut taken by Thomas Laupstad.

For the Word Play class this week, I brought my students a box of objects: a pine cone, an egg, a flashlight, some rubber gloves, etc. The goal was to find a way, through a 3-step process, to turn their simple objects into poems about life and statements of humanity.

One of my students picked the egg (brown, hard boiled). For the first step, she wrote a thorough clinical list. She discovered that the skin of an egg is not entirely smooth, but "coarse like sand pebbles." She described the shape as a cameo, and she noted its hidden "luscious core."

The great thing about an object poem is that you don't have to start with a blank page. Because you begin with a description of an egg or a glove or whatever you've chosen, you get to find your way into the poem slowly.

So, here's how you do it: