| Number
294/295
Summer/Fall 2005
A Lyrical Intellect: An Interview
with Kay Ryan
MARIT MacARTHUR
Copyright © 2005 Poetry Flash
Born in 1945, Kay Ryan has published five books of poetry
– Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (Taylor Street Press,
1983), Strangely Marked Metal (1985) and Flamingo
Watching (1994), both from Copper Beech Press, and Elephant
Rocks (1996), Say Uncle (2000), and The Niagra
River (2005), her new one, all from Grove Press. Her work
has been included twice in Best American Poetry, and
in Best of the Best American Poetry. She has received
three Pushcart Prizes, an Ingram Merrill Award, National Endowment
of the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, the Maurice English Poetry
Prize. In 2004, she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from
the Poetry Foundation.
Marit MacArthur is currently an assistant professor at CSU Bakersfield.
This interview was conducted at Kay Ryan’s home in Fairfax,
California, on August 12, 2004.
MARIT MacARTHUR: Where did you
grow up?
KAY RYAN: I was born in San Jose. We
moved away when I was six months old, to southern California,
and I was raised in the Central Valley, in little towns. Like
Pond, a little farming community. Not too far from Punkin Center,
and other specially named places. Punkin, it was called. Maybe
it was spelled Pumpkin Center. It was kind of a rough area. A
lot of fights there, as I understood. And then when I had finished
sixth grade, we moved to the Mojave Desert, a town called Rosamond
— about 2,000 people.
MM: So pretty rural over all?
KR: Yeah, well, not city. Always little
places, with the exception of Bakersfield, which was pretty big.
I lived from third grade to sixth grade in Bakersfield.
MM: What did your family do for a living?
KR: Well, before my mother married,
she taught elementary school for a few years. And then she stayed
home and took care of my brother and myself. My father was a blue-collar
worker, always, a variety of things. He was a big dreamer.
MM: Yeah, I think I remember the “Worm
Farm” poem. [“In Memorium: Worm Farm,” in Dragon
Acts to Dragon Ends.]
KR: Good. My mother always dreaded having him
get a thousand dollars in the bank, because he would want to go
into business. I mean, he didn’t usually go into business,
but he tried several times. He had a chromium mine where all he
really got was hemorrhoids, and he had several drilling operations.
He was a driller — oil well driller, cess pool, septic tank,
water well. That was the way he earned his living.
MM: Drilling holes for different reasons.
KR: Yes, sometimes being part of a business
that went broke, and part of the time working for others. It depended.
[Laughter]
MM: Has your family been in California long?
KR: My father’s parents emigrated from
Denmark, and arrived fairly quickly in California. And so my father
was raised here.
MM: Did he grow up speaking any Danish?
KR: He had an accent, actually. He’s been
dead for a long time now. He said dis and dat, and it sounded
like he’d spoken Danish. Probably he spoke it until school
age, because his parents at that time didn’t know English
yet, but he didn’t bring any into adulthood. And later my
grandparents never spoke it at all. My mother’s family was
from Nevada, and she met my father in Nevada.
MM: So they had been out here for a while.
KR: I don’t even know. I was thinking
about that the other day. My mother’s mother’s family
came from Missouri, and they were very poor, and that’s
about all I know. My grandmother was a teacher. She only had a
high school diploma, but that was adequate in Nevada at that time.
She taught in the gold mines, in these little mining camps.
MM: Wow. So, how did you like growing up in those
small towns in the Central Valley?
KR: I didn’t know the difference. It was
fine—I went swimming a lot, in the public pools. I was a
happy and contented child. I had a happy childhood.
MM: That’s great! [Laughter]
KR: I really think for the most part I did.
I wasn’t a terribly troubled child. One of my frustrations
was that I was a tomboy, but I was kind of fat and not very brave.
So it’s kind of bad if you’re a tomboy and you’re
not—good at it, you know? [Laughter] I had the jeans, I
had my brother’s boots. But you know, I just didn’t
have the dare-devil, physical properties.
MM: And then—you went to community college,
and then to UCLA?
KR: I went to two years of community college,
and graduated from Antelope Valley College in the Mojave Desert
in Lancaster. I went there because I didn’t have enough
money to go to university at the time, and I thought I would get
scholarships, and I did. And then I went to UCLA, not really because
I wanted to. My father had died when I was a sophomore, and I
needed to stay near my mother. And so I went to UCLA. It was very
close. I took my B.A. and my Master’s degree there, in English.
MM: What poetry did you study intensely in college?
KR: Well, at UCLA, I had an interesting course
in Yeats. I went on to work on a Ph.D. at Irvine, after realizing
that I didn’t want to teach community college English, which,
ironically, I then ended up doing for the rest of my life. [Laughter]
At Irvine I had a good course in William Carlos Williams. Oh,
I had an undergraduate course with a lot of Stevens in it. So
I studied those poets… but I wasn’t terribly marked.
I loved it, but I don’t know that I was particularly affected
at that time by anyone. Maybe Williams more than anybody.
MM: So you’ve taught for a living?
KR: Almost my entire life, I have taught basic
English skills, part time. Always trading money for time. Doing
without much money, and having quite a lot of time. I am made
in such a way that I loathe responsibility to the outside world,
and I’m easily overwhelmed by too much. I like a very quiet
life. And so I always knew that it would be important for me to
have less money and more solitude. And so I always did that.
MM: It’s great to recognize that, early
on.
KR: Yes, I have such sympathy for people who
find themselves in very complicated lives with lots of responsibilities,
which they feel. Obligations which they have
to fulfill. And they’re not cut out for it. I mean, it’s
terrible to be in a life that’s wrong for your temperament.
MM: I think a lot of people aren’t
cut out for that kind of life. But there aren’t a lot of
obvious options these days.
KR: I don’t know if options are
ever obvious. I think there’s always a way that society
is generally squeezing you. And you just have to listen to yourself.
MM: I think there are just a lot of high-pressure
options—to be hyperproductive, and materialistic.
KR: I remember there were these Time
and Motion surveys, for UPS I think, efficiency stuff. Do it with
the fewest steps in the briefest time. And I remember my grandmother’s
kitchen, which my grandfather had designed—he was a carpenter;
he built their house—wasn’t efficient. And I thought
to myself, You know what? It doesn’t matter. I mean, this
is where she lives; this is what she does, putter around the kitchen.
So what if she walks an extra mile every day? Good! And I thought,
who can really define what’s efficient? Because it would
depend upon what was getting done, wouldn’t it?
MM: There was a Norwegian movie that came out
recently called Kitchen Stories, about these Swedes who actually
were, in the fifties, studying efficiency in kitchens and redesigning
them to be more efficient. These Swedish single men have to go
live in little trailers outside the houses of Norwegian bachelors,
and go inside—[Laughter]—and sit in these little high
chairs and observe them. You know, draw little maps of their movements,
and they aren’t supposed to talk…
KR: I want to see the movie. Yes, so often,
people don’t stop and think, what am I saving my time for?
MM: Yeah, like maybe it’s nice to get exercise
in your kitchen.
KR: Yes. Maybe it is; maybe you would like that.
My grandmother was quite plump as it was, she certainly didn’t
need to sit in her rocking chair any more. [Laughter]
MM: Okay. How and when did you ‘decide’
to become a poet—or, to put it another way, when did it
first seem possible to try to write poetry seriously?
KR: Well, I think that I had dallied
with it, always. Oh, I was telling Carol [Adair, Ryan’s
partner] the other day, I had a dream when I was a little kid.
It would have to be before fifth grade. It was such a striking
dream that I never forgot it—I was chasing a piece of paper
that had the most beautiful poem in the world on it. And at that
time, poetry wasn’t a particular interest of mine. I’ve
always liked language, I especially love to be funny. And I was
a class clown, you know.
 But
I would say that when my father died, I wrote my first genuine
poem. I’ll say it for you. It was called “After Zeno,”
Zeno being the author of paradoxes, right. I was only 19 at the
time, so I gave it a fancy title like that. But the poem was not
fancy:
Where
is is
when
is is was?
I
have an is,
but
where is his?
When
he was, I was.
But
I still am,
and
he is still.
Now
here, no where.
Such
a little, fatal pause.
There’s
no sense
in
past tense.
MM: That’s good.
KR: That was pretty interesting. And then I
wrote much less interesting stuff, after that. It must have been
the emotional intensity that made me write something very clean
like that. And then it declined. When I went to UCLA, I tried
to get in the poetry club, but they wouldn’t have me. So.
I pursued it idly. When I was at UC Irvine as a graduate student,
I put together a manuscript of essentially funny poems, and I
sent them to -- Dell? You know—paperbacks, trash—
MM: Not an obvious choice.
KR: It was sort of like a lark. I suppose I
didn’t have any way to take it seriously. Because I hadn’t
found any way to allow poetry to be serious for me. I
didn’t like the idea of exposure, so most of my poetry was
really aggressively funny, and witty and whimsical. And I just
fiddled with it for a long time. But it — poetry —
gradually sort of took over my mind. I realize that in some sense
my mind was actually being taken over, by its making poetry on
its own. And I would think: But I’d rather be a carpenter.
I was sort of interested in woodworking, although I was teaching
part-time.
MM: You have a poem about not being able to avoid
a gift, a talent that just keeps cropping up. [“Full Measure,”
in Elephant Rocks.]
KR: Yes. So I took this long bicycle trip across
the country. I’ve written about it, for ZYZZYVA—
Howard Junker asked for it, how you became a writer. And so anyhow,
I took this bicycle ride across the United States in 1976, when
I was, I guess, thirty. Yeah, oh my God, I’d become thirty.
And it was four thousand miles, and I thought, well, I’ll
think about: am I going to write. And I really saw that as an
opportunity. And I actually had a mountain-top experience.
MM: On top of what mountain?
KR: Hoosier Pass, Colorado. Bicycling up it.
It’s high. And I really went into a kind of altered state,
where I felt undifferentiated from everything that was around
me and I had just this incredible mental capacity. And I could
think anything, and I could think it as far as a laser beam. I
felt a remarkable power, which I knew I would only have for a
little while. And I thought, okay. Let’s use it. Shall I
write? Shall I be a writer? And I didn’t know what kind
of answer to expect. Maybe like, No, you’re not good enough
really, or, Yes, yes, but—something like that.
The answer I got was: Do you like it? That was the answer. Do
you like it? Which was utterly simple to answer. Because I did.
Yeah. So it was such a beautifully perfect, simple answer.
MM: I’m afraid it’s like following
your bliss.
KR: Yeah, it was. It was. And so I came back
and had to figure out some way to do it. So I’d say I was
thirty before I really understood that I was going to have to
face the fact that I did not want to be exposed in that way. That
I loathed the idea of the poet. The posture, the pose
of the poet, the understanding of it. I hate: Oh, you’re
a poet? I’m a poet too. Or: Oh, you’re a poet.
MM: Or, you’re a poet, you must be a romantic
slob.
KR: Right, just the whole cloak, you know, the
whole mantle. It was alien to me. I mean, I’d been
trained not to put on airs, and not to expose feelings. I mean,
we were Danish! They’re as bad as Norwegians! [Laughter]
MM: And so then, you decided—well then,
I need some time to write in my life.
KR: I didn’t really have to change the
way I was living, although after I came home from the bike ride,
I took off that following semester. I think I did. And
I decided, well, I’ll begin my writing discipline by transcribing
the journal that I kept—the bicycle journal. So I did that.
All I got was a lot of typed bicycle journal, and a habit. [Laughter]
I thought: Okay, this is crap. This isn’t it. But
I got the habit, of writing. And then I had to find my way into
writing, on my own. I’ve always been an autodidact. I’ve
never gone to classes and I’ve never accepted help. I’ve
been unhelpable. I haven’t been able to ask for it, and
I haven’t been able to get it. I just figured out a way
on my own, slowly.
MM: That’s really interesting. Of course,
the interview is supposed to be about you, but I think it’s
nice when it’s more of a conversation.
KR: No, I hate that. I’d much rather have
a conversation.
MM: Well, I had some things that are parallel.
The first real poem I wrote was an elegy for my father, who died
when I was almost 14, and I didn’t write it until I was
nineteen or twenty. And it was just a lot better than anything
I wrote after that for a long time.
KR: So you really understood what I
meant [about “After Zeno”].
MM: Yes. But I felt like all I could do in my
poetry was write seriously. And I’ve sort of gone the other
direction—learning how to bring wit and humor into my writing,
which is fun.
KR: Well, it was very hard for me to figure
out how to access deeper things, you know. Or how to tolerate
them, because they’re always there, and they’re always
popping out. But how to stand them, how not to deny them.
So it was very hard.
MM: But having the fullness of your personality,
instead of just one side…
KR: Well, if it’s going to be poetry,
it’s got to have—everything in it. Or it isn’t
poetry. But, I don’t think poetry has got to match your
outside at all. And it doesn’t.
I think that is a problem, something that we feel, but I don’t
think we just have to overcome it. That is, it doesn’t have
to match; it can be terribly lopsided. It doesn’t matter
if it appears very warped. It should be unwholesome,
it shouldn’t be well-rounded.
MM: I agree. Just if there are major things you want to
express that you don’t feel able to… It’s a
different problem, than trying to represent—
KR: Well, I don’t know. I think that sometimes
the things that we want to express and that we don’t feel
able to are the things that charge the thing we can do,
that we wind up doing. I think we have to have a big bank of things
that we can’t touch. In order to write whatever small thing
we manage to write. Because it will inform it in some way.
MM: Yeah. It’s like if you write a novel,
you have to know the whole life of your character, even if they’re
only in there for a year, or something. Okay. How and why did
you make your way to northern California?
KR: Okay. How. I was at UC Irvine,
and I dropped out of the Ph.D. program. I had been married. I
got the name Ryan from a marriage, but the marriage had broken
up.
MM: When did you get married? When you were—how
old?
KR: In 1968. Twenty-two. We went to
high school together, but I didn’t know him then. He was
a band geek, and I was a different kind of a geek.
MM: What was your name before, your maiden name?
KR: Pedersen. Danish, right? Sometimes it gets
spelled wrong.
MM: But you kept Ryan.
KR: Yeah, Kay Ryan is just such a nice name,
and I kept it for a while, and then by the time I really wanted
to sort of celebrate Pedersen or my real roots, it was sort of
too late. I was used to being Kay Ryan, and I’d published
a few things with it. And besides, you don’t need very many
letters to spell it, and the “a” and the “y”
are reused in my last name. Very handy. You know, if you had to
buy letter beads, you wouldn’t have to spend very much money.
MM: Yeah, it’s true. It’s convenient.
KR: Yeah. So I got a girlfriend, and
we were traveling around in my Volkswagen bus. In the summer of
1971. And we ended up here in Marin County, where her parents
lived — in Kentfield. And I decided to teach in a free school.
Free schools were alternative schools for hippie children, taught
by hippies. You know, it was the time. And so I was going to teach
in this school in San Anselmo. I realized that it was free, but
it also didn’t pay. I was going to have to earn a living.
So I got a class at College of Marin, at the very last minute.
[Snaps her fingers.] And then I just forgot about the free school
and kept teaching at College of Marin and that’s the end
of my life.
MM: Yeah, you’re still teaching there,
and you’re still here. You know, there’s a fair amount
of desert and ocean in your poetry, or coastal-ness, which might
correspond, I would guess, to growing up in the San Joaquin Valley
and the Mojave Desert, and settling later in Marin County. Do
you have any sense of how these landscapes have been significant,
atmospherically, to your poetry?
KR: Well, I like empty spaces. It could be that
I had never lived near either of them, but they would represent
for me a sort of featurelessness, or a kind of relief from—
MM: Features.
KR: [Laughter] Yeah, which would essentially
be featurelessness. Kind of a pleasant absence of stuff. I don’t
even know that they would require my having had first-hand experience.
Most of my work, as I’m sure you have noticed, is not particularly
interested in recording the outside world of nature or event.
It’s opportunistic and uses it as it will.
MM: Yeah, there aren’t lengthy descriptions
of those landscapes. But they sort of go along with your whole
asceticism.
KR: I’m always using ‘em. Yeah.
MM: You wrote in the poem “Lime Light”
that “One can’t work / by lime light.” Has toiling
away in relative obscurity helped you develop as a poet?
KR: Well, I don’t have anything to compare
it to, since I did toil away in relative obscurity…
MM: But compared to the careers of other poets
that you’re familiar with—
KR: Yes, I do. Because I think it’s frightening
to be seen very much. Other people’s expectations —
I’m a very weak person, and I’m about strong enough
to keep myself away.
MM: Away from?
KR: I mean away from influence. Like responsibility.
I hate responsibility; I’m not good at it, so I just keep
myself from having it. I’m strong enough to not take on
what I can’t handle. And I’ve had just about enough
strength to not be in proximity to influences that I wouldn’t
have been able to resist. I don’t know how anybody would
resist them. When you’re young…
MM: Yeah, it must be an awful lot of pressure,
early on, to have fame—
KR: Yes, at least in retrospect, I
feel it worked out very well for me—although, it is very
hard to work with no recognition. Very hard. But I don’t
think it’s bad for you, unless you get just starved to death.
I mean, I think people can just dry up and blow away. It can be
too much of a good thing. I think we need some little drip of
approval, and encouragement. That’s such an interesting
question, though—if I could see myself, fifteen years ago,
sitting here now and saying these things, I might say: You idiot.
I’m just about to die. And you’re saying, Oh, it was
all good, it all worked out? Well, I’m just about to die.
You know? And I might die. I might die of this. It’s
pretty darn lonely out here. And nobody’s saying yes to
this stuff.
MM: And discouraging.
KR: Yeah! But now, I have the solace of—
MM: Starting to get a lot more recognition. On
the other hand, do you think toiling away in obscurity has hindered
you in any way—I mean, working at such a remove from major
poetry scenes on the east coast, or creative writing programs—
KR: Not at all. Not at all.
MM: So you don’t feel like you missed anything.
KR: No. I don’t. Partly because I’m
just a nonjoiner. It wouldn’t be right for other people,
but there wasn’t anything for me.
MM: There was no draw.
KR: There was no draw. And there is
no draw. I just—can’t be otherwise. It’s just
how I am. I do not—receive information in that way. I can’t
be helped.
MM: Okay. How, and when, and why, did you start
to publish your poems more widely? Specifically, how did you come
to publish Strangely Marked Metal and Flamingo Watching
with Copper Beech Press, and how did you get on with Grove Press
for Elephant Rocks and Say Uncle?
KR: Good question, interesting question.
I would be interested in that, if I were trying to get published.
I went the regular route. With the help of my partner Carol. We
got together in 1979. I was really despairing. I’d written
mountains of work. And had sent it out a little bit, and it just
seemed so pathetic, the little magazines seemed so nothing, and
my little random publications just seemed hopelessly remote and
minuscule and discouraging.
And Carol said: “You know, we’re going to have to
make a plan. Get the book. Where do you publish? Where are the
places to send them out? We’ll make a list, we’ll
get your poems in stacks of five or six or whatever, we’ll
do this like a business. And we’ll expect one success for
every hundred sent out. And we won’t care.” And so
she just helped me terrifically, in that practical way. And I
was published in very small journals, and I could write a letter
and say, well, I’ve been in these journals, and get in slightly
better journals. And eventually, my first real success was getting
two poems in Poetry magazine, twenty years ago—although
it seems longer—this May.
MM: And of course, May 2004 is when you won the
Ruth Lily Award from the Poetry Foundation, which publishes Poetry
magazine.
KR: That’s right. It was such a perfect
circle.
MM: What were the poems?
KR: “Marianne Moore Announces Lunch”
and “The Egyptians.” They’re both in Strangely
Marked Metal. And the fellow who runs, to this day, Copper
Beech Press, saw them and invited me to send a manuscript. Which
was a thrill.
MM: Yeah, that must have been exciting.
KR: So he published Strangely Marked Metal,
which appeared to great silence. It caused not a single ripple.
MM: You know, John Ashbery complains that his
first book, Some Trees, which won the Yale Younger Poets
Prize—it was reviewed, and then it was like it didn’t
even happen.
KR: It [Strangely Marked Metal] wasn’t
reviewed. Mine didn’t happen. I wasn’t discouraged
at that time; I was just delighted. But then nothing happened.
And you know, the poems stacked up again, and I sent them out
to a variety of places. And Harper & Row was one of them.
I got a young editor who adored the poems, who made me believe
that they were going to start a whole new poetry series, and mine
was going to be the first book. And then it fell through. That
was a very dashing experience.
And then it took almost ten years between the two books, Strangely
Marked Metal and Flamingo Watching, which was also
from Copper Beech Press. And the reason was that at first, I tried
to get a bigger publisher. Then I had the Harper & Row thing,
that fell through. They tried to find me another press. They were
very sorry. And eventually, I published again with Copper Beech
Press. I was very sorry to do so, because I was afraid exactly
the same thing would happen again. It just seemed like suicide.
But—that
is not what happened. What happened was that George Bradley,
who was a Yale Younger Poet winner, he reviewed, he found my book.
I’m not sure how he found Flamingo Watching, but
he did find it. And he reviewed it for Yale. And he was also selecting
poetry manuscripts for Grove, at that time. And he wrote me a
letter, and he said, “You’ve just published this book.
But when you have another manuscript, please send it.” And
I sent him one in three days. I mean, I just couldn’t—
MM: Because you had more—
KR: I had tons! I mean, all these years—
[Laughter]
MM: So you sent him Elephant Rocks?
KR: So I sent him Elephant Rocks
in three days, because I had learned my lesson, that nothing is
sure. If something seems to be in the offing, go for it. So I
sent the manuscript, like that. [Snaps her fingers.]
MM: And—Flamingo Watching was
published in ’94, and Elephant Rocks in ’96?
So pretty close.
KR: Yeah, I think you’re right, ’94
and ’96. Oh, also, Flamingo Watching was a finalist
for the Lamont. So anyhow, it got a little attention, and a little
critical attention, and it got Elephant Rocks published.
MM: And then Grove was happy to have Say Uncle
too.
KR: They were. They’ve been lovely to me. And they’ve
kept them in print. And you know, nobody makes money off poetry.
MM: So what about Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends,
your first book?
KR: Oh, well, I’ve always had this problem,
until I got with Grove, of poetry mounting up and—what do
you do when you’re feeling so hopeless, like every writer.
And Carol got together a group of my friends and had a surprise
party. My brother was there, from the desert. All these people
were there. It was at this cool place called the Blue Rock, in
Larkspur. I was just there with friends, and my friend said, “Oh,
I think there’s a Mary Kay convention going on back there!”
And I’m a sucker for any camp stuff like that, so I go and
I pull open this curtain—and there are my friends. And they’d
all contributed money to publish a book. So my book says, “For
Carol and the first fifty subscribers.” And so it was essentially
self-published. It’s called Taylor Street Press, and I live
on Taylor Drive. That’s the only book that Taylor Street
Press ever published. So that was—satisfying in a way, and
not satisfying in the sense that it was self-published, really.
MM: It’s a good book, though.
KR: Well, thank you, it was the best I could
do at the time. And you have to start. One of the things that
I now know is that you just have to begin; you just have
to do something. And you can’t be better than you are at
the time. And you have to do—you can’t wait
until you’re better.
MM: There’s a great essay by James Fenton
about apprenticeship in poetry. It’s different than other
arts, he says, where you can practice, you know, figure drawing.
He says the only thing you can do to become a poet is to try to
write poems. And the ones you write at first are not going to
be very good, but you have to do that. [The essay is called “A
Lesson from Michelangelo,” in The Strength of Poetry.]
KR: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I felt that I
was so much better than I was—
MM: But you need some of that energy—
KR: Yeah, it’s a funny—lack of connection
between what I see now as the product and how good I thought I
was. [Laughter]
MM: Well, it’s some sense of potential,
maybe, too…
KR: Maybe it is. We carry something that makes
us feel that we can do it.
MM: I mean, there are, even in imperfectly realized,
younger poems, there always are amazing sections, or something,
even if you see later, Oh, well, that was flawed. Part of it is
great. At least that’s true of your work.
KR: Well, thank you. It’s always kept
me very interested.
MM: It seems like Carol has been great for your
career.
KR: She has been. I don’t know that I
would have—I mean, you never can take any element out and
know what would have happened. I really had no other life, I was
going to be a poet, it’s quite clear that I was going to
do that. Kicking and screaming. I didn’t want to
be one. But I don’t know what would have happened to me
without Carol’s help. Because I can’t organize, and
I can’t think into the future. I can write, but I can’t
put things together in a practical way. And that’s awful!
I mean, she could do things like make binders of my work, and
figure out what was where. And give me a method for keeping track
of things. You know, poetry is so nothing, and it makes so little
mark on the world of one’s local community. We set up in
this very kitchen a little table and a bulletin board. And when
I got anything in a magazine, or got an acceptance letter, it
went up on this bulletin board. And on the table, there was a
little, slowly filling rack of little journals I was
in. It was like a little shrine. And Carol said, “We’ve
got to make it important here. It’s got to exist here.”
MM: That’s so great.
KR: It was. It was absolutely great!
MM: And she teaches English?
KR: She teaches at College of Marin.
MM: Is that how you met her?
KR: I met her at San Quentin.
MM: When you were teaching there.
KR: Yeah, she was putting together cell study
programs and she was in working in education, as well as having
a zillion other jobs. She was finishing up degrees at San Francisco
State. So we were both at San Quentin. But she was there first.
She was the first woman in the education department there.
MM: Is she from northern California?
KR: She’s from Marin. She was raised here.
She went to elementary school in Larkspur. She went to College
of Marin. She went to San Francisco State. So she’s really
a home girl. She went to San Rafael High.
MM: You’ve said things that suggest it’s
almost laughable to be a poet—
KR: Oh, I think it is.
MM: Or you suggest that it’s particularly
hard these days, like in poems like “A Bad Time for the
Sublime,” and “’In the Very Essence of Poetry
There is Something Indecent’” [in Strangely Marked
Metal]. [Laughter]
KR: Oh, those are really old ones,
aren’t they?
MM: Do you know many poets from other countries
or cultures who are less embarrassed about their vocation?
KR: Well, I don’t think most American
poets are as embarrassed as I am. Just from an informal survey
of my life experience, people seem to be more comfortable with
their avocation than I have been. So I don’t know. I think
it’s personal. I think it’s me.
MM: Why is it you, though?
KR: Well, I’ve always wanted to be a good
old boy. I think I was really meant to be sittin’ in some
bar, bein’ stupid. So part of me just kind of thinks I’m
putting on airs.
MM: Do you think that’s partly from your
background? Not wanting to become a pretentious…
KR: Yeah. I wanted to be out with my Dad and
uncle, with our feet up on the back of the pick-up, up on the
bumper, you know, talking about what we’d do if we got a
thousand dollars. [Laughter]
MM: What did your uncle do?
KR: Drilled wells. Although in his later years
he had a bar. One of those early morning bars where the roofers
go in before work? [Laughter]
MM: Okay, this is a little bit of a turn. Some
of your poetry seems to evidence a preoccupation with Christianity—like,
the situation of Christ’s birth, maybe these are a little
older—
KR: No, that’s okay. Ask me about that.
MM: For instance, “The Fourth Wise Man,”
“Stars of Bethlehems,” “The Excluded Animals,”
etc. [from Say Uncle and Elephant Rocks] and—and
possibly Catholicism, given the saints and monks who appear in
your poems. There’s also an interest in asceticism, Christian
or Buddhist—in “That Will to Divest,” for instance
[from Say Uncle]—and some poems seem close to Buddhist
questions of self-examination. Were you raised in a particular
religious tradition, and if so, how rigorously?
KR: We observed the faith of proximity. My father
was gone most of the time, staying in some crappy trailer house
next to the drilling rig out in the middle of the Nevada desert.
So our spiritual progress was left to my mother. My father would
not have insisted on any spiritual progress. But my mother didn’t
drive. She felt that we should have a little spiritual guidance,
so we went to whatever church was closest to the rented house
that we were living in. The church of convenience. So I went to
the Church of the Brethren, for example—sometimes they were
almost Holy Rollers, sometimes they were pretty refined. We were
never Mormons or Catholics, though.
MM: Just various Protestant denominations.
KR: Various Protestant denominations, right.
And I’m a reader of American and English poetry and literature,
and so the habit of Biblical, of Christian reference, is there,
is available to me. They’re powerful stories. I got it through
literature, and through casual Sunday school. Carol was raised
Catholic, and is really good at telling stories, like the story
of Naomi and Ruth—Whither thou goest, there I will go—the
verses that are used in marriage were really about two women.
I have that poem called “The Second,” which uses that
line. [In Elephant Rocks.] At least if I half-way remember
the stories, she remembers them better. So I have a little bit
of Christian background, Carol has some Catholic background, and
I am attracted to the ascetic. A lot of that is just the attraction
to—cells. Just really liking an essentially nice clean scrubbed
cell. [Laughter]
MM: Do you know Elizabeth Bishop’s story
“In Prison”?
KR: Oh—It’s really weird,
isn’t it?
MM: Yeah, she—the character—wants
to be locked away in a cell. But has opinions about what the cell
should look like.
KR: Yeah. I was just remembering. I told you
about that dream of chasing the most beautiful poem in the world?
I had this other dream, when I was little. About the same age.
I dreamed that I had a house, and I had to crawl between the rooms.
I lived there by myself. And it was so little, that I had to crawl
from room to room. [Laughter] I loved it!
MM: Nice and confining.
KR: Yes, nice and confining. So we could see
the illness developing very well, from early childhood. Oh, but
I want to tell you the funny thing that you noted about the Christmas
poems, the manger scenes. I always send out a Christmas card,
and a lot of times it’s funny. But sometimes I can’t
think of a joke, and I write a poem. So, those poems have been
on Christmas cards, mostly.
MM: Have you pursued any spiritual or religious
studies in your adult life?
KR: No. No, not at all.
MM: Has living in northern California, and inevitably
doing yoga and so on, influenced you at all?
KR: [Laughter] I have inevitably done yoga,
and it’s done me quite a lot of good! Well, I’ve learned
to say “Namaste,” I can do “Om” in groups…
I would say that I have not been influenced particularly by northern
California spiritual pursuits.
MM: Okay.
KR: Although I enjoy being embraced by them.
[Laughter] Sometimes Jane Hirschfield and I give readings, and
she has a very strong Buddhist background and following, and you
know, a lot of the Buddhists admire her work a great deal, as
they should. But at these readings they’ll say, “You’re
really a Buddhist. You have Buddhist ideas in your poems.”
MM: Yeah. I’m not a Buddhist, but I would
say that too.
KR: So, anyhow, I’m perfectly happy to
think that.
MM: If I had to pigeonhole you as a poet of feeling
or of thinking, I’d say you’re a poet of thinking
or ideas—or feeling about thinking about ideas. A lyrical
intellect—
KR: Or thinking about feeling ideas —
[Laughter]
MM: Do you think of yourself as an intellectual
or cerebral poet?
KR: I think of myself as a puzzle, because I
do think that my poems have a great deal of brain force in them.
They are very mental for me. My brain is very thrilled to—I
can’t be articulate about this.
MM: You write them out of brain thrill energy?
KR: [Laughter] Yeah. Please do not
quote me. I write them with brain thrill energy. It’s exhilarating.
It’s mentally—accelerating. It is a condition of mental
acceleration, as Brodsky put it so articulately, and as I am restating
so poorly. It’s brain fun for me. But it also exposes things—I
mean, it’s got to have the heart in it, the feeling in it.
MM: Well, and there’s a lot of thinking
about emotions —
KR: I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure
they’re there. Because, where do the feelings reside? In
the mind.
MM: That’s where we think about them, anyway.
KR: Yeah, well, I mean, maybe that’s where
we have them. I mean, how do we have them? Where are they? Which
chakra? [Laughter]
MM: I think you have the feeling that they’re
in your chest a little—
KR: Or in your eyes.
MM: Or in your stomach.
KR: Or in your burning eyes, or your throat.
MM: I think definitely the stomach sometimes
too.
KR: I’m not big on the stomach. Carol
does a lot of stomach feeling. I’m not a big stomach feeler.
Chest? The—brachia. A lot of brachial feeling. I’m
a brachial feeler. [Laughter]
MM: You seem to read very widely—you know,
you’ve read the Greeks and the Modernists, and you obviously
read Ripley’s Believe It or Not. I would guess
you might also read Natural History, or other science
magazines, because you know, for instance, that eucalyptus trees
make the soil around them barren. Basically, what do you read?
And how much do you think your poetry comes out of, or relates
to, your reading?
KR: Well. I read a lot of murder mysteries,
like Philip Larkin. I like the distance in a mystery. I like the
formal properties. I like its disinterest in improving me. I also
read—it’s sort of surprising to me—I tend to
read the essays of poets.
MM: Have you read Louise Glück’s essays?
In Proofs and Theories—
KR: No. And you’re the second person who’s
told me I should.
MM: They’re extremely dense little essays.
KR: I’m not a scholarly thinker. I don’t
pursue things. I’m kind of a magpie. I read a little of
this, a little of that.
MM: Do you watch television or listen to the
radio?
KR: No. I listen to the radio. I don’t
watch television at all. We have a television now. For many years
we didn’t. I like to watch movies on it.
MM: What do you listen to on the radio?
KR: NPR. And Carol likes to listen to music
and I like the house quiet. So when I’m alone the house
is like this—quiet.
MM: So—how do the little science things
come in to your poems? The little facts about plants and animals?
KR: Well, a lot of them are made up.
MM: But some of them are true.
KR: Well, yes. [Laughter] But, I mean, anybody
could get that much. Some of them I could get from television.
There was something about the osprey, twenty years ago, the hungry
ugly osprey nests in Scotland. And I think Carol told me about
eucalyptus trees killing everything under them. I just happened
to like it. I like natural science. But I’m not very good
at pursuing whole books. Stiff is a wonderful book that
I’ve been reading recently. It’s about what happens
to bodies after we’re dead, all the different possible things.
Very well written. The author has a nice bracing, witty approach,
and tons of information. But I’ll read part of a book like
that, and never pick it up again. I’m a dallier, and a dabbler.
I’m a magazine reader too. I don’t work hard at reading;
I’m passive. But I’m extremely picky about poetry
and, say, about essayists. Right now I’m very excited about
reading Pessoa, especially The Book of Disquiet, I find
extremely interesting. I like hard people, like Kundera; I love
to read his essays. Calvino. Nabokov. I adore Brodsky’s
essays.
MM: Do you like his poetry?
KR: I can’t make heads or tails out of
Brodsky’s poetry in English. I’m just hoping—judging
by his essays, it must be gorgeous poetry. But I don’t think
it’s gorgeous in English, I think it’s laughable.
And not in a good way.
MM: And why do you like Samuel Johnson?
KR: He’s such an immense figure, such
an immense mind. Such a great symbol of probity. Such a creator
of balance out of so much personal imbalance. And such a giant.
Also, I adore him because I know him to a great degree through
the biography by William Jackson Bate. And to me that’s
just one of the great biographies of all time. I think he’s
just glorious. And he wrote the English Dictionary! [Laughter]
MM: He’s so sweet. I remember reading sometime
that he resolved his whole life to get up at six, and every day
he slept until noon.
KR: He failed every day. He
was always struggling against himself. Such a mighty struggle
too. You know, in someone that big, the struggles are so big.
MM: What about Emily Dickinson? You’ve
said that you feel very close to her.
KR: Well, doesn’t everybody? [Laughter]
Isn’t she everybody’s best friend?
MM: She’s mine now, but I didn’t
like her when I was in high school, and I definitely have some
students who hate her.
KR: Well, she’s our genius poet,
as far as I’m concerned. There’s never been anybody
who captured the condition of the mind itself, for one thing,
the way she has. Nobody, nobody who could cut faster—
MM: To the quick. Yeah, she’s certainly
one of the most direct poets. I love the index of first lines,
of her collected poems. I want to read every single one!
KR: Every single one! She starts right in, there’s
no lead in.
MM: I have a poem of hers I wrote on a cup. The
one that starts, “Your thoughts don’t have words every
day—”
KR: I’m not even familiar with that one.
It sounds wonderful.
MM: You start that way too—you really begin
where the heart of the matter is.
KR: Well, thank you. What’s cool, what’s
weird, is that even in a poem as good as an Emily Dickinson poem,
only half of it’s good. You know, you’ll read the
littlest poem and you’ll go, Oh God, this is the greatest
poem in the world, and then the second stanza is shit. It’s
so amazing.
MM: Or just isn’t essential.
KR: Yeah. It’s so weird how little it
takes to achieve everything. And how you can easily—
MM: Just keep too much extra stuff.
KR: Yeah. It’s hard to know.
MM: How much do you admire Elizabeth Bishop?
Because I imagine I hear some echoes here and there. I don’t
know, I could just be imagining, because I just finished writing
a dissertation chapter on her.
KR: Oh, yeah, that would do it.
MM: But “Crustacean Island” reminded
me of some bits from “The Bight,” and “Waste”
reminded me of “One Art.”
KR: Yeah, “click, click,” right?
That’s so funny because The New Yorker called me
on that. They said, “Do we have to put that in italics or
something?” And I said, “What are you talking about?”
They said, “That’s from Bishop,” and I had no
knowledge of it.
MM: But you’d read it, sometime?
KR: I suppose I had. But I would say that, although
I very much admire some of her poetry, I would say that
my admiration for her work developed far past a moment when I
could be influenced. I like her work; I consider it some of the
best, and I’m glad you thought about her a lot. I’ve
read quite a lot about her. But I’m only interested in biography
after I love a writer. I hate people who come to literature
through biography, the details of the life. That is really, deeply,
uninteresting to me. And I’m not interested in my life that
way either, and I’m not interested in anyone being interested
in my life that way.
MM: Well, it just doesn’t make sense, because
what someone’s life is like really does not mean that they’re
going to write anything interesting at all.
KR: No, it certainly doesn’t.
MM: It’s like that poem, “To Explain
the Solitary” [in Elephant Rocks]—you said that “Ireland
didn’t hurt Yeats into song.”
You know, I find some of your poems to be didactic somewhat in
the same way that Samuel Johnson’s essays are. But I don’t
mind being preached to a little, because in your work and in his,
there is real wit and insight. Do you think it’s possible
or advisable to write moral or didactic poetry now? I mean, it
seems very tricky and risky to strike that tone, but you seem
to manage it.
KR: Well, I think you bring up something very
interesting. I think my method for investigating things, which
is what I like to do in poetry—if you aren’t going
beyond what you know when you start, then you aren’t writing
a poem. My method is sometimes to say something essentially insupportable,
and it might sound didactic, really quite outrageous. It’s
just a claim that I make, and then I support it, ferociously and
ridiculously. What I’ve figured out is that I’m interested
in the things that you just about can’t see, or can’t
hear, or can’t know. And so what I try to do is overstate
them terrifically, to make them—extremely real—and
then to act as though they are real. It’s just—what
I do. I’m very drawn to cartooning, for example. If I could
live another life, I’d be a wonderful cartoonist. Simplification.
That’s really what the original meaning of cartoon was,
just the outline of the thing. But I like something simple—I
like simple and charged.
MM: But you’re not afraid of making these
moral statements—
KR: I’m not afraid of making ridiculous
moral statements either. I don’t care at all if they hold
water. I don’t care about their truth value. I mean, later
I care about their truth value. I make a proposition and support
it for all I’m worth. But it might be essentially indefensible.
So I think that if I am didactic, it’s not sober. It might
not be spurious but it’s not sober. I don’t think
didacticism is tenable; if I have some kind of didacticism, it’s
saved by the fact that it’s full of crap, that it’s
hokum, and that it admits that it’s hokum. You know?
MM: And that it admits that it’s questioning
something, not trying to assert it.
KR: I might say there’s an animal,
a recently discovered animal that can reverse directions. I made
that up.
MM: Yeah, some of those things are made up.
KR: Some are. Some aren’t.
MM: Have you studied, have you read any philosophy?
Just because you’re throwing around some terms like truth
value—
KR: Oh, just undergraduate. I don’t have
the patience for that kind of writing. Carol is a much better
reader than I am. She’ll read things that I won’t
read, but I pick up a lot of information from her. I love to get
it second-hand. You asked how I get my information—I just
get it from all over the place.
MM: You really do seem a bit unusual among contemporary
poets in your taste for 18th-century wit, and allegory, and some
moral themes. I always loved what Montaigne said, that he felt
that he was in a timeless dialogue with writers, in his library.
KR: Oh, absolutely.
MM: Do you ever feel that you would have been
more suited to writing in a different time?
KR: No, I feel incredibly lucky to have managed
to do it in this time—But I do feel that my companions are
on my shelves. And I do live with them.
MM: And some of them are pretty old.
KR: Yeah. But, see, that’s the beauty
of real—that’s got to be the real definition of classic
literature in the sense that, it’s fresh. A hundred years
later, five hundred years later, a thousand years later.
MM: Could you name your top five companions?
KR: I don’t know. I like to read
Larkin.
MM: Yeah, I love him too. He was almost in my
dissertation.
KR: Yeah? He’s awfully interesting,
he’s awfully good.
MM: Have you read his novels?
KR: Yeah, I’ve read ‘em all. Well,
I mean, he only wrote two, right? Yeah, they were very—able.
Though I don’t like them nearly as well as his poetry. He
wanted to be a novelist, and you know what he said? He didn’t
like humans enough; he didn’t have enough love for people.
He would have preferred it. A better life, you know?
MM: Well, he might have just been more interested
in himself, than not—I mean, he always said misanthropic
things like that, but I think he was also deeply interested in
himself. And to be a novelist you have to be deeply interested
in other people.
KR: Yeah, and you have to love them in some
sense. I think he meant that he was not that interested in society,
and the world. How people get along in the world—
MM: Yeah, but some of his poems are interested
in those things. I just think that a lot of things he said—because
he was so funny, you always have to look at the context—
KR: God, he was funny—
MM: He didn’t necessarily mean a lot of
things that he said.
KR: You know, I hope people lighten up—
MM: People got mad about those letters with Kingley
Amis—
KR: I mean, these were good old boys together!
MM: Well, and they were also immature young men—
KR: That’s right.
MM: They were joking around, and some of it was
rude, but, Jesus—
KR: And a lot of it was pose. And it was the
kind of tone you’d only take with a very good friend.
MM: Yes. They were not poems he was trying to
publish. I have a rather obvious theory that when you’re
talking about poets, the poems are the things they meant the most
seriously.
KR: The poems are what they wrote.
MM: Then maybe, you know, their essays, then
maybe their letters, then maybe things they said in lectures.
But really, those things are not what they meant most, those are
the poems.
KR: That’s right, that’s right.
MM: Quite a few painters used to come up in some
of your poems. Your earlier poetry was a little bit more directly
referential. You know, inspired by particular texts or works of
art.
KR: I see myself growing away from that. I lost
interest in pursuing the story of anybody. Maybe the earlier poems
talk about Hopper, or Toulouse-Lautrec, or Chagall… I needed
more of a vehicle, just pasting things together with my own mind.
At that time, I think. Sometimes, anyway.
MM: So visual art isn’t very important
to your poetry these days.
KR: I couldn’t even tell you what is.
I get something in my head, and things just get sort of attracted
to it. It’s … some kind of magnetism.
MM: Do you have a routine for reading and writing?
KR: I used to be quite regular about writing
most mornings. I’ve gotten sloppier as I’ve gotten
older. But I’m a morning writer. I like to read before I
write. And I like to read really hard things that I don’t
read at any other time of day. It has to be really clean, really
smart and really clean. Somebody like Calvino. Or Brodsky. Something
very mentally exciting. And I read it with half my brain floating
around. Sometimes I read for a few minutes, sometimes longer.
Just a kind of an elevation, like going up into the mountains.
Getting yourself up there. And I write a poem in a sitting. Pretty
much. Because I have a lot of things operating at once; a lot
of balls are in the air. And a lot of competing things that I
want to have happen in a poem. Or it won’t be interesting
to me. And so, most of it has to happen at a single time. I can
go back and tweak it, but—I usually write in bed—I
might spend three hours working on a poem, and write ten or fifteen
copies of it. Redo it, a lot. So it’s a very intense, brief
period of time. I consider three hours awfully brief. Although
I usually get something that I have to throw away out of it.
MM: I don’t know if this is really possible
to talk about, but do you know what some of those competing things
are, that you need to have in a poem for it to be interesting?
KR: Well, I know some of them. One is I need
to have a sense of it getting somewhere; it has to achieve something;
it has to get to an ending. I value an ending a great deal. It
can’t just be atmospheric, or suggest or nudge. It’s
got to arrive somewhere, and it has to have the sense of force
and motion. It has to—drive. It just can’t be meandering
around. It may seem very idle; it may be very idle. But it has
to be directed idleness, even if it seems just like it’s
playing around. It’s got to have some kind of an idea in
it that is interesting to me, to be pursuing. It’s got to
have sound. The sounds have to work. They’ve got to work
right. It has to all be tied up with sounds. And there has to
be a certain kind of interior rhythm that I’m not sure anybody
could sense, but it has a kind of a rhythmic shape for me. And
it’s got to have brilliant—what do I want to say?
Images, things that are bright, that are sharp. I can’t
stand mush. I can’t stand vague pastel. Yuck. [Laughter]
I don’t know if it’s making sense, what I’m
saying.
MM: No, it does. At least to someone who knows
your poetry. There’s also a certain amount of meditating
on idiom or cliché in your poetry. You never take that
kind of language at face value, otherwise it wouldn’t belong
in a poem, of course. And I like this quality in your work. It
reminds me of some comments that John Ashbery once made in an
interview, about idiom and cliché and jargon. I’d
like you to comment on his comments, if you don’t mind.
KR: Yeah, great! Sure.
MM: He said he “was…very attracted
by the possibility of using very prosy elements, conversation
or journalese…to extract what’s frequently poetic
and moving in these forms of communication which are very often
apparent to us and which haven’t been investigated very
much in poetry.” And that he does not mean to be “so
much satirical as really try to revitalize some way of expression
that might have fallen into disrepute…just because it’s
a way that we frequently have of speaking it deserves our attention
and we should find out what it is that makes us talk that way
and why it is that we do that, there’s a good reason I think
each time.”
KR: Well, that’s very interesting. I think,
usually, clichés are beautiful. They are preserved in language
because they are usually so lovely. You know, “It’s
always darkest just before the dawn.” Oh, the things
that last, that are oversaid and that have been oversaid
because they’re so effective. I mean, they’ve lost
their effectiveness also because they’ve been said so much,
but—
MM: They survive for the same reasons that proverbs
do—
KR: And for the very same reason that
poetry survives. That they are finally, they are a memorable
way of saying something.
MM: Well, and it’s nicer to call them idioms
than clichés. Or to draw a line, because some of them are
clichés.
KR: Yeah—you could call them saws, call
them a variety of things. They’re folk wisdom too, often.
And they just come into my mind. The thing is, I think in them.
They’re like titles. And, well, often they are titles. And
then I start thinking, well, what would that really mean? So they
just turn into a little door. They’re a convenience, partly;
they’re a little door into thinking. Something like “Lime
Light,” just thinking about things like that. I’m
sure I was feeling a little bit burned. Maybe being seen a little
too much? I can’t write about anything head-on. But if I
thought about something absurd, like, using limes for light, then
I could wind up thinking about what I was really feeling. Kundera
said that we’re—well, I’m misquoting, but he
said that we’re not as smart as our work. And that’s
absolutely true. So we have to find some door into our work. And
I love the common ways that things are said. I love them.
One thing I would like to add to the things that I demand from
my own writing is that I want the language to be extremely
elastic. I mean, I want it to go from the very common
to the rare. The whole matter of what in the world a natural voice
is, and the kind of tyranny that some concept of using
a natural voice can exert is very—very maddening
to me. I think we don’t have natural voices. They’re
either all natural or unnatural, because they’re all learned,
and they’re all patched together, and I want my voice in
my poems to be as big as it can be. And to be just really unpredictable.
To have that virtue of English, which is just that it absorbs
everything.
MM: I think that’s kind of what Ashbery
is getting at too, that he wanted all of these kinds of language
to be able to come into his writing. He said he wanted to include
in his poetry “as many kinds of [diction] as I can think
of.” And he also often starts with titles, that are often
clichés—
KR: Does he? Yeah. Poetry is the preserver of
language, right? And you know the only way it can successfully
ever preserve is through pleasure. Because no one, in
the long run, is ever going to remember any poems, and
pass that language on, unless it continues to bring pleasure.
I mean, academia can’t do it. All the schools in the world
can’t do it.
MM: I think that’s why some language poetry
is going to fall away. Because it’s not pleasant.
KR: Yeah.
MM: I’m sorry I keep talking about Ashbery,
but he’s also in my dissertation.
KR: It’s good, you’re teaching me.
I’ll learn from you, it’ll be in the next poem. [Laughter]
MM: A poet I studied with in college, Mary Kinzie,
once wrote a wonderful essay about the closest possible attention
to poetic language, called “At the Level of Words.”
[In The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose.] You do write
at the level of words. You are so exacting with diction, rhyme,
assonance, alliteration, phrasing, lineation, all at once—it
all just seems especially focused in your work.
But, you’re more inventive than the New Formalists, in the
sense that you’re writing free verse, but that you freely
make use of all the tools of traditional formal verse. How do
you think you developed into such a disciplined poet, I mean aurally
and technically and lexically—you know?
KR: Well, it is simply dependent upon temperament.
I haven’t been able to do anything else. But I would say
that when I first started writing poetry, I felt very embarrassed
about rhyme. Because rhyme was out. It was so utterly unfashionable.
But I love rhyme. And so I know that I gradually found a way to
include rhyme in my writing, and I kept working on that—I’m
not saying consciously working on it, but I wanted it
and I gradually evolved a method for getting it—I’ve
always thought rhyme was funny. That’s partly because I’ve
come of age in such a self-conscious time, when it was considered
old-fashioned. And anything ordered was old-fashioned, ordered
in a regular sense. And so I have always thought that rhyme was
funny by its nature, and I’ve enjoyed playing with it as
much as possible. As far as the tightness in the work, I just
can’t stand crap. [Laughter] And I think most things go
on far too long. It’s temperamental. I’m not saying
that I’m right for the world, but I’m saying that
for my nature, I want things to have terrific—force.
MM: And they can only have that when they’re
short?
KR: I think so. I just have to have a lot of
force.
MM: Well, that’s what lyric poetry is,
I suppose. You’re a lyric poet, not a narrative poet. Did
you want to say anything else — about your poems being disciplined?
KR: I admire discipline a lot. And I think poetry
is extremely hard work. And requires terrific discipline. And
terrific dedication. And I’m very impatient with slop. Sloppy
writers, sloppy thinkers, sloppy workers.
MM: You seem to have really found your form,
in short poems with rather clipped lines. Do you think you’ll
ever write poems with longer lines again?
KR: I have no way of knowing. They’ve
gotten progressively narrower, over the course of several books.
MM: James Schuyler called his lyric poems “skinny
poems.” Yours are skinny.
KR: Yeah, mine are skinny. I think when you write such
short poems as I do, it’s nice to slow people down with
the very narrow line. It brings the attention to each word, you
know, and it works rhythmically very interestingly, I think.
I’ve often thought that having more words close to the edge
increases the oxidation. You know, like surfaces oxidize? I have
more surface on my poems. I have more exposed edges. They’re
almost all exposed edge, if you think about it.
MM: Yeah, so you have to pay attention to the
edge.
KR: The front is almost the back. [Laughter]
The beginning is almost the end.
MM: Line breaks are one of the hardest things
to teach students to pay attention to.
KR: You know, I’ve found them incredibly
maddening, myself. I didn’t find anything inevitable about
it, and I could do most of my poems a variety of ways, to this
day.
MM: Really?
KR: Yeah, I mean I wish I could say there was
more of a law of it, or an inevitability—
MM: Well, the syntax is so much of it, that maybe—
KR: Well, one of the things I love
to do is to hide rhyme. Some of my line breaks involve hiding
it. It’s interesting, I could talk much longer about the
line breaks in a poem, probably, than about the poem. Because
it’s fascinating why you place one thing after another,
and how you might have done it otherwise. Yeah, it’s got
to be ultimately a kind of intuitive thing. The Formalists would
have a reason for—they’d line the rhymes up at the
end. Or something like that.
MM: Yeah. And that’s less surprising. And
also, it might have to do with working out a complex thought in
a complex sentence. Practically, it makes more sense to break
it up.
KR: Yeah, a lot of times I have quite complex
syntax.
MM: And you have to take it—you have to
absorb it, piece by piece. Samuel Johnson would probably be easier
for my students to read if I broke it up.
KR: Yeah. Hey, you know what? Speaking of rearranging
things—if you rearrange Marianne Moore—who’s
so unreadable, these crazy poems jumping down the page, and you
make them into paragraphs? They’re quite readable.
MM: Yeah. You might have heard of Robert Pinsky’s
theory that a lot of poets who seem to be writing free verse are
actually writing in “broken pentameters.” Do you have
any feelings about that, or about iambic pentameter?
KR: No. [Laughter]
MM: Okay.
KR: I would like to see more attention to—sounds.
It seems to me such a pity. To write broken-up prose. You know?
I mean, there is an awful lot of broken-up prose. I think it’s
indefensible.
MM: Yeah—one of the things that struck
me as most original when I first started reading your work was:
This woman is paying attention to sound in a way that
most people I’m reading are not. That’s such
a part of poetry that a lot of people seem to have lost sight
of—or to have lost the ear for.
KR: I think partly they lost it through that
embarrassment with rhyme. Feeling like all of those things are
old-fashioned. We don’t do that. Which is crazy, that just
means people are not willing to—they don’t think for
themselves, they don’t think: what do I love? What are the
beauties of language?
MM: I think it comes partly from poetry being
too visual, because then you’re going to lose a sense for
sound. If more people are just reading it—
KR: Oh, but what about the fact that
they’re all doing the readings? I mean, people give so many
readings. And they’re so boring.
MM: I know, I know…Frost is also in my
dissertation. Obviously he had a real sense of sound, and he did
a lot of readings.
KR: I adore Frost. Okay, Frost is major.
MM: He’s one of your companions?
KR: Sure. He really is a companion.
MM: Paul Muldoon, who you’re going to read
with in November, is also a great sound person. I don’t
know how much you’ve read him. [Muldoon and Ryan gave a
reading together, and were interviewed by Robert Hass, for City
Arts and Lectures in San Francisco on November 15, 2004.]
KR: I haven’t read a lot, but I’m
really looking forward to reading with him. And I think he’s
pretty darn funny, and I’ve met him, and he’s a dear
man.
MM: He really is a sweetheart. He and Pinsky
read at this Frost symposium I helped organize last summer [at
Dartmouth College], together, and they had such different styles.
Pinsky was like a stand-up bass; he read “To Earthward”
and he was bringing out every sound in the poem. It was amazing.
But Muldoon was much more lilting and just made every line of
Frost sound like the complete mystery that it is. He was just
tripping along, you know—I think you’ll have fun,
reading with him.
KR: I think so too.
MM: Okay. Some of your older books are hard to
get a hold of, and there’s much good in them, I hope you’d
grant.
KR: Thank you.
MM: So when can we expect your next book? And
maybe a Selected Poems?
KR: I’m thinking next year—2005—for
my next book. [The Niagara River has just been published
by Grove. –editor]
MM: And maybe the Ruth Lily Award will help motivate
Grove to do a Selected Poems. I don’t know.
KR: I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I suppose it’s getting to be about time.
MM: I think so. For people who really care about
your whole career, it’d be nice.
KR: Thank you. Well, yeah, I don’t know
how many of those first two books I’d put in, anyway. Some,
I suppose.
MM: Okay, last question. And this has to do with
where you’re going off to now. I think some readers will
want me to ask it. Has being a lesbian affected your writing,
and since I know you got married in San Francisco when it was
legal—
KR: [Laughter] It’s like when drugs were
legal —
MM: Yes. And it just so happens that today, the
California Supreme Court voided all of those marriages—
[Adair comes to join us in the kitchen.]
KR: I think I’ll just shoot to
the point, which is my work. And I would say that it has not been
important in my work, particularly. Now, say with somebody like
Elizabeth Bishop, it may be very important in her work, and it
may not. And I think you can look at my work, and I think you
can answer the question for yourself. It isn’t important.
It’s personal in another kind of way, but it’s not
personal in that way.
CAROL ADAIR: It’s the
underlying current of her personal life.
MM: So are you two mad about this [the
court decision]?
CA: I am so unbelievably sad. It breaks
my heart. And I had to cry a little bit first. That’s why
I have no make-up on. If I have eye make-up on I won’t cry,
because I’m too vain. [Laughter]
KR: That’s why soldiers wear eye
make-up.
CA: They do, because that keeps them
from crying. I’m real sad, but I understand people’s
problems, whatever their religions are, or whatever their ick-factor
is, a lot of people find homosexuality icky, whatever their problems
are. I understand. People used to feel things, that way, when
I was a youngster, about black people.
KR: Or miscegenation.
CA: Black people couldn’t
live in my neighborhood. It wasn’t legal.
MM: Yes, people used to feel that way more about
interracial couples.
KR: Yeah, that’s right. Repelled.
CA: But they felt that way even about
living next to black people, working with—
KR: Unnatural.
CA: Or women driving a school bus. I
was in high school the first time that ever happened. So—I’ve
seen things change, and I know that first, it feels real bad,
and then you keep pushing. And until that fifteen-year-old in
South Dakota—I don’t know who it is—has every
right that everyone else has, I’ll keep fighting.
KR: Yeah, there are still people who
feel like killing themselves because they’re queer.
MM: It’s easy to forget that, living in
the Bay Area.
KR: It is. Yeah, it doesn’t seem
like any big problem—
CA: It’s not a little thing to
me, and I’m surprised—I was surprised when I got married
how much it meant to me, and—I was shocked, I thought it
was political. But it just meant so much. And I was surprised
how bad I felt—I mean, I knew it was going to be overturned.
I knew it. But now, that’s that. Now other things have to
happen.
MM: Yeah, well, having the state say that, No,
you aren’t married anymore.
CA: Yeah, just dump your wife. Just dump your
husband. So. I’ll leave you guys alone.
MM: No, thanks. That was good to hear.
KR: Well. It wasn’t easy when I was younger,
but it’s never been — you know, my poetry has always
occupied its own place. And I’ve never been especially commenting
on the outside world.
MM: Yeah. And if it matters, it’s obviously
not in any direct way. That I can see. Maybe a poem like “The
Second”—
KR: Yeah. I guess I’d just say,
just look at the work, and judge from that. But—I have my
obligations to the outside world…
MM: Okay. So that’s it. Thank
you.
[Adair and Ryan then left for San Francisco City Hall, to
join others protesting against the decision of the California
Supreme Court, which invalidated their marriage of six months.]
Marit MacArthur attended graduate school at the University of
California, Davis. She taught American Literature for a semester
at the University of Lodz, Poland, and is now an assistant professor
at CSU-Bakersfield.
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