Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur" and Kay Ryan's "Blandeur"

Given Kay Ryan's coined word "Blandeur" as a title, I strongly suspect that she has in mind Gerard Manley Hopkins' famous sonnet, "God's Grandeur."

God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

For comparison, here again is Ryan's "Blandeur" from yesterday:

Blandeur by Kay Ryan : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


Ryan seems to say such gifts can be as exhausting as they are stunning, so she playfully asks the deity to tone it down, to inflict upon her a little less drama and splendor in the world. It's too much.


I'm not pushing any religiosity in the two poems, but I have to acknowledge that it's there, albeit in very different ways. Maybe those differences reflect the century of change in sentient witnesses' attitudes upon encountering the divine, or at least the omnipotent. In fact, I wonder if Ryan is speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at modernism's reluctance or inability to accept such displays as manifestations of the divine, while Hopkins is all too happy to say, Bring it on, Lord, and praise be.

The poems provide an awfully good basis for comparison, yet I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even catch the connection between them until after I'd posted "Blandeur" yesterday.


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Kay Ryan, "Blandeur"

Starting with the title's play on "Grandeur," Kay Ryan's "Blandeur" is witty while these photos are sorta postcard-sappy. Also, I don't have a Swiss Alp to offer (like her Eiger). Still, I think she and I share a perspective. I believe someone said the
whole is more than the sum of its
parts . . . .

Blandeur by Kay Ryan : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and
Poets. Discover Poetry.



Milkweed, Michigan's Northern Lower Peninsula





A Rothko Bean Field, near Tuscarawas, Eastern Ohio


















Wheatfield before a Storm, Southern Ontario











Sunrise on the Atlantac, Northern Florida















Mountain Farm, Central Pennsylvania


Blandeur by Kay Ryan : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and
Poets. Discover Poetry.

Dodge Poetry Festival, Jericho Brown, "Tracks, Summertime," Janis Joplin, Kay Ryan

The Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest poetry convention in North America. This year 20,000 visitors were expected. Jaded—or just weary—as I am concerning conferences of any kind, I was shocked at how good I felt at this event.

That’s especially odd for Banjo-Brain because the conference moved this year from a pastoral tent setting in outstate New Jersey to downtown Newark. Some festival veterans (it was my first time) thought the new setting, plus the selection of poets, added a more urban, multicultural dimension. Whether or not that was new, it was present and it was good.

Fifty poets read and offered workshops over four days—last Thursday through Sunday. This included five former U.S. Poet Laureates—Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Kay Ryan, and Mark Strand.


On Friday the diverse population included hundreds of high school kids, who were remarkably well-behaved and seemed genuinely interested. I cannot imagine being 16, a New York-ish kid or an outstate rube (more like Banjo) and finding myself bused to some glitzy cultural center, then herded into a room of 500 people, and listening—really listening—to somebody named Kay Ryan, who had a lady “partner” –

(“Gus, does that mean what I think it does?” “Well, I ‘spect.”)—

and this athletic-looking old lady (as old as that Banjo guy, for godssakes), this Kay Ryan was a poet-Laawrrrl-something, as she talked about poetry, and how she became a poet, deciding during a bicycle ride across the country, on a Colorado mountain, and talking about what it meant to be a poet, how it was both an embarrassment and a calling.

(“Gus, you mean like a preacher?” “Well, I ‘spect.”)

All this at 16? Yet listen they did, at least most of them—and asked questions, none of them dumb. It was stirring.

It’s hard to know where to begin reporting on such an important experience, but one way is to mention some poets who were new to me and who sounded good. So today I offer Jericho Brown. He read “Track 4, Summertime,” attached here, and he explained that it’s a persona poem: he’s speaking as if he were Janis Joplin (of Port Arthur, Texas). Maybe these lines from Jericho Brown will tease you into reading the whole poem (it’s only a page):

The band plays. I just belt out, Please. This tune
Ain’t half the blues. I should be thankful.
I get high and moan like a lawn mower
So nobody notices I’m such an ugly girl.
I’m such an ugly girl. I try to sing like a man
Boys call, boy. I turn my face to God. I pray. I wish
I could pour oil on everything green in Port Arthur.

For the whole poem (plus two more), click here: Tracks

And if you'd like a reminder of the remarkable voice and style of Joplin, click here:
YouTube - janis joplin must see or die


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KAY RYAN, "The Edges of Time," Part 2

Student? Footnote. See below.

Photos: another view of things emptying, though not in a frenzy?

Excerpt: 'The Best Of It' : NPR



Sorry to belabor "The Edges of Time," especially since some of you have already noted your preference for seeing a poem as a whole--maybe you would say as an impression rather than a case study. Actually, I think I do too, but when I notice leaves hanging on the tree, I need to talk about them and wonder about their purposes. Are they just decorative, or are they essential to the overall shape, condition, and appeal of the tree? Kay Ryan invites such study in "The Edges of Time."

Other than Kurt Vonnegut (in Slaughterhouse-Five) and Kay Ryan, who thinks of time as viscous? As amber? Who thinks of time or amber as something that holds a swarm of intentions, like bees? And those bees become a “racket of claims” and “A / glittering fan of things / competing to happen.”

I’d never have thought of “unseizing” as a verb, nor time as the amber fist that does the unseizing of those inner bees, nor of things competing to happen, though it now seems that’s exactly what things do. When there’s a frenzy, when we’re late, when time is about to run out, everything competes to happen—to get birthed in a hurry and a flurry.

The bees were in my bonnet, more or less. Why didn’t I hear them till now? I am a fish, very much out of water, which now retreats from sustaining me, though I holler and wiggle desperately on the damp sand.

(Am I a fish with a bonnet full of bees? Apparently do. Try to live with it.).

Notice too that in practically every poem Ryan employs several sound devices, usually rhyme and assonance (identical vowel sounds in proximity). Because the similar sounds are not usually at the ends of lines, where we’re used to hearing them, we might overlook them. Again we must read aloud and go slow, or we’ll miss little gifts like “suspending” and “intentions,” “bees” and “unseizes,” “humming” and “coming.”

And when time is running to its edges, things get frantic. So Ryan hits us with a barrage of short “a” sounds: “stacks . . . back . . . racket . . . flattens . . . fan . . . happen . . . as . . . .” In my ear-mind connection, that short “a” feels thick, over-full, in need of emptying. Maybe I subconsciously hear words like “fat” or “bladder” in other short “a” words. I cannot argue that everyone should hear the short “a” that way, but maybe my ears are not entirely alone.

Then Ryan concludes with an assonance so strong I had to listen twice to notice it wasn’t exact rhyme: “. . . when seas / retreat.”

Finally, I’d argue that these poetic devices are not baubles. Also, Ryan’s perspectives on the edges of time aren’t just new; they also make sense. They’re reasonable propositions, even as they matter-of-factly portray the desperation of victims as time retreats to its edges like an ebbing sea.

“Logic” doesn’t seem quite the right word, but Ryan’s perspectives on all this are at least plausible. When we combine plausibility with the fresh and the new in words and ideas, we get creativity, originality, a way of seeing an experience that’s hard or impossible to talk about in straightforward prose. As poets are fond of saying, someone is "saying the unsayable." We get a rendering of an important idea, and at least for a moment, it seems there is no other way to understand or utter it. It was there all along, but Kay Ryan saw it and said it.

Excerpt: 'The Best Of It' : NPR

(Note: If you're a student using any of these words or ideas, be sure to footnote properly).

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KAY RYAN, "The Edges of Time"

Excerpt: 'The Best Of It' : NPR


Today I heard Kay Ryan read "The Edges of Time" and discuss poetry in general, and I'm back to being an acolyte. Ryan mentioned Emily Dickinson as one of her heroes (first Hopkins, she said--for exposing new ways to stretch language -- then Donne and Dickinson). Like Ryan, E.D. explores the far corners of the mind, with ususual curiosity and apparent accuracy, catching this or that shading or oddness in a psyche or a mental process. Those adventures within and about the human mind plus the shared penchant for precise, sharp language are the two most prominent features that Ryan and E.D. share.

Well, there is also their brevity. In an age when poets (as well as fiction writers) feel free to go on and on, Ryan and Dickinson seem to feel an honorable obligation to density, richness, and power of language--finding the word that is just right--precise, interesting, original, quirky, the word that throws a genuinely new, legitimate, and important light (or darkness) on a subject.

Feel free to look at the other two poems, of course, ("Home to Roost" has appeared here before); however "The Edges of Time" is my primary interest today.

Excerpt: 'The Best Of It' : NPR

Conversation and Poetry. Kay Ryan.

Home to Roost - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More


In her comments yesterday, Brenda casually wondered here about the conversation and poetry, which led me to think about the whole issue once again. There are rumors of a whole "school" of thought about a kind of poetry called "ultra talk." I don't completely understand it, but I think I have enough of an inkling to launch this response.

About conversation and poetry, I guess I'm one of those bombastic old farts who think poetry chisels language, thought, emotion, and experience in ways that even the best conversation cannot accomplish. Sometimes prose has occasional passages that are "poetic," but that's hardly required of the prose writer. So I have to wonder why any poet would want or expect his "poetry" to sound like prose or conversation. If you want that, why not write fiction or memoir? Are they inferior genres?

For survival, I suppose we should preserve conversation; we should keep on talking—well, some people should cut back. Some should buy duct tape. There are many arenas in which we need to be willing to say A is not B; one of those is the poetry business, and this includes the fact that conversation is not poetry.

Yet "conversational poetry," as a category or description, makes perfect sense and is not inherently negative, as much of Frost—mostly the blank verse Frost—should prove, along with hundreds of skillfully wrought free verse poems by dozens of different poets. (Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Lux, Sharon Olds, to name only a few). Of course, the skillful poets are the ones who put the lie to the label "free" in free verse, but that's another treatise.

Look at today’s poem, “Home to Roost,” by current U.S. poet laureate, Kay Ryan. Is conversation ever that terse, that mysterious? What conversation shows such economy of language? And doesn't economy translate to respect for language? Like money, we don’t throw it around. We make it count.

(Unless we’re high up at AIG or GM or Enron; apparently, they talk a lot, mostly in multisyllabic words, for they confuse words with money, so multi is always a good thing. At the top floors, they never say what they mean; that way, they can sneak off with the loot. So are they speaking poems? For those who think poetry is circumlocution, remember that every institution has a secret language. The question is, what is its intent? To deceive? That’s not poetry. It might be law and the corporate world, or even medicine, or the military, or the CIA, or educational jargon, even the jargon about poetry. But it’s not poetry. When good poetry gets dense, it wants us to feel full, not tricked and not broke).

So, back to Kay Ryan. Look at the layers of meaning, beginning with literal chickens, but suggesting and then demanding we notice larger darkness and craziness. This feels a little like Dickinson to me (again), but maybe that’s only because we’ve been talking about her recently.

Also, notice that Ryan does use rhyme, but it’s internal rhyme, not end rhyme. There’s music here; it’s spare, it’s tight, it’s tough, it’s not messing around. But it is music.

I get consternated—that’s my word; don’t touch it—when people want everything they say or do to have great meaning and beauty. It’s something like the art dealer who says, “Well, if you like it, it’s good.” Liar. Although we’ll never reach mathematical precision or universal agreement about what’s good in the arts, simply avoiding the . . . conversation . . . amounts to laziness or deception or cowardice. Our conversation won't be poetry, but would you say we have something better to talk about?

Home to Roost - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More