Poetry Sunday

Editor and blogger Molly O'Neill occasionally celebrates 'Poetry Friday' by sharing a favorite poem with her readers. I find that little tradition completely lovely and wish to adopt it.


Kay Ryan is a poet who reminds me so much of Annie Dillard: a rooted muser, a wit and a wonderer, but never the fool. To get to know her better, enjoy an essay she wrote in 2005 about her experiences at that thing she dreads the most, the Writers Conference. Some snippets I cherish--


On the old way of mailing one's writing to an editor:

Whether or not I started out liking the patient discipline of this exchange, I came to like it. It slowed me down. If I’d gotten those poems back at email speed, say, they wouldn’t have been away long enough for me to lose hope the way you need to. You really shouldn’t be living for a reaction all the time. I also liked the fact that there were no faces or voices; we were all disembodied, writer and editor alike. Just the slow old mail. I wanted my poems to fight their way like that. Fight and fight again. No networking, no friends in high places, no internships. I think that’s how poems finally have to live, alone without your help, so they should get used to it.


On writers' workshops:

I have to assume that the writer respects these other writers’ opinions, and that just scares the daylights out of me. It doesn’t matter if their opinions really are respectable; I just think the writer has given up way too much inside. Let’s not share. Really. Go off in your own direction way too far, get lost, test the metal of your work in your own acids.


On poetry readings in an auditorium of hundreds of listeners:

But what could you tell about anybody’s poetry in this big-top atmosphere? 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. Aren’t the persuasions of poetry private? To my mind, the right sized room to hear poetry is my head, the words speaking from the page.


:)


Here is her poem, "That Vase of Lilacs," to celebrate the budding of ours.


That Vase of Lilacs


Not just lilacs
are like that;
other purples also
leave us vacant
portals, susceptible
to vagrant spirits.
But take that vase
of lilacs: who goes
near it is erased.
In spite of Proust,
the sense don't
attach us to a place
or time: we're used
by sweetness--
taken, defenseless,
invaded by a line
of Saracens,
Picts, Angles,
double rows of
frangrance-loving
ancients--people
matched casually
by nose in an
impersonal and
intermittent immortality
of purple.