In his review of Kay Ryan at the Los Angeles Times, John Freeman writes, “Contemporary poetry is a bit like visual art. Much of it makes you grab your chin and nod in stumped appreciation — but you wouldn't want to live with it. Kay Ryan's work, however, hangs well no matter where it goes. Clouds, calendars, time, birds, jackrabbits. Everything her eye falls upon takes on a brisk, beautifully complete clarity. Her tidy lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal warmth: a ferocious capacity for finding the essence of things.”
Freeman is using tropes of a narrow, diametric view of contemporary poetry. He means to account first for the scores of opaque (at best, oblique) avant poets, such as Charles Bernstein, Kenneth Goldsmith and, to some degree at least, John Ashbery, whose poems are not “about,” are often not meant to connect or communicate, and sometimes are even “about” the fact of not being about anything. The other species, implies John, is accessible, allusive, usually springing from a classic tradition and clearly seeking to evoke and mean and move. The recent PLOTUSs are of this latter type (though Kay Ryan is probably more cerebral, more abstract); and in their verse, a reader finds objects and ideas that he recognizes and that connect to a longer poetical tradition: “Clouds, calendars, time, birds, jackrabbits.”
So. What to make of this. I'm not here going to chastise the reviewer — he is employing a model of thinking about and judging contemporary poetry (and art). First of all, I think it can be said that to speak of something as “contemporary” is to place it in a particular genre or type. Second, if a poet doesn't exhibit the qualities that make you “nod in stumped appreciation” then they are not, somewhat confusingly, “contemporary.”(As if Kay Ryan were already a passed memory.)
If a poet wanted to be iconoclastic in this muddle — and of course you do want that because, as Christopher Ricks once said, “nothing is more dangerous if you want to create great art than playing safe” — that would mean breaking out of this dichotomy between the chin-rubbing and the jackrabbits.
1 comments:
This may seem very off-beat, but the qualities I find most intriguing in, say, the work of Rae Armantrout, are the same qualities that attract me in Ryan's work.
Both mine the intuitive edges of apprehension, where language and elusive sensory impressions hide. Armantrout is more interested in how these nest inside language--especially our daily, casual language--whereas Ryan is attempting to coin new descriptives for them, to tweeze them out.
Neither seems to me opaque, or particularly difficult to comprehend--though sometimes an Armantrout poem may take a while to figure out.
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