Making 'the best of it' in poetry
Reviewed by Tess Taylor
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 19, 2006
The Niagara River
By Kay Ryan
GROVE; 72 PAGES; $13 PAPERBACK
In classical rhetoric, there's a form called litotes. It comes from the Greek, meaning smooth, plain or meager. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by a negative of the contrary." An example of this is when people say, "that was no small feat" -- meaning that it was, in fact, a great one. Sometimes rhetoricians define this as "understatement." It is perhaps an imprecise term for the kind of strategy Fairfax poet Kay Ryan is using all the time in her remarkable poems. In them, plain things, like doorknobs or Chinese acupuncture charts, claim to be no big deal. But in Ryan's poems, the seemingly small subject will quickly and surprisingly open onto something seemingly grander. Something unlatches a trick lock. A doorknob implies the world of rooms beyond it.
Ryan has built a whole career on creating these sidelong shards, and "The Niagara River," Ryan's sixth book, and winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, offers another batch of Ryan's plain yet oddly metaphysical poems. Because Ryan is fascinated with the glimpse or the glimmer, another rhetorician might point out the way her poems make use of synecdoche, depicting small parts that affirm a larger whole. But neither rhetorical term would be quite right, which leaves one scratching one's head about Ryan's poems. How do they work?
In part, through their humor: The typical Ryan poem (if there could be said to be such a thing) often begins with a funny, improbable premise: the difficulty of carrying an invisible ladder, or, as in the title poem, the odd feeling of sitting along the Niagara River -- not on the banks, but on top of the river itself, watching the shore roll by. Other poems are devoted to Houdini, stardust and to "fake spots": Crow School (for the birds, naturally) is a place to learn the quid pro crow. And once they launch, her slender poems are studded with internal rhyme and lined with wordplay that is rarely (if ever) merely clever. Sometimes Ryan's verbal range seems improbable: After all, who can use "essence of flimsy" or "pink glowy spots" in a poem and have it succeed? Ryan passes from the potentially rickety terrain of the cute into alertness, a kind of airy dexterity. She compresses her logic with whimsy.
Part of the pleasure in Ryan's work also comes from the way in which she lets us know she knows what she's doing. Without seeming pompous, or even winking too hard, she makes object lessons from her poems. The poems function both as poems and as arguments that explain (or at least puzzle out) why her type of poetry should exist. In a poem titled (oddly enough) "Repulsive Theory," Ryan asks about bays: "And do these cutout coasts/ and in-curved rhetorical beaches/ not baffle the onslaught/ of the sea or of objectionable people/ and give private life/ what small protection it's got?" Theory may be repulsive, but it is hard not to look at Ryan's poems as a series of lovely, if rocky, rhetorical beaches. In fact, in another poem, "Desert Reservoirs," Ryan seems to offer this comparison yet again. Describing the reservoirs, she writes:
They are beachless
basins, steep-edged
catches, unnatural
bodies of water wedged
into canyons, stranded
anti-mirages
unable to vanish
or moisten a landscape
of cactus adapted
to thrift ...
Ryan has just sketched her own poetry, a project of creating oddly shaped reservoirs. They're real, but unable to moisten much. They're gemlike things that persist, confounding our sense of value. Ryan's poems are tough, too.
Depicting poetry as an extreme landscape is just right, because there's something pointed about Ryan's verse as well. Just when one might relax into Ryan's humor or begin to move along with her dance, her jewels seem ready to remind us how they've been cut. In a poem called "The Best of It," she meditates:
However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep making
the best of it as though
it doesn't matter that
our acre's down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we'd rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.
It brings to mind the Emily Dickinson poem: "To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, -- / One clover, and a bee,/ And revery./ The revery alone will do/ If bees are few." Dickinson's poem also depicts a synecdoche, where the clover stands in for the whole prairie. Ryan revisits this prairie with a kind of incisive questioning. What if we only get one bean? What if using the part for the whole means we only have the part? The question is rueful, unsettling. It also contains a riddle: Can the bean nourish us? Should it? The poem upends us into an intense meditation on poetic economy, and on economy more widely. To live with one bean is no small feat.
In a different poem, Ryan describes someone trying to sketch a rat in as few pen strokes as possible. She writes, "The test begins:/ to see how little/ will suggest/ the rat again." Ryan is a master of suggesting a lot in few strokes. Like the desert, her poems are like a "landscape .../ adapted to thrift." Within the landscape of contemporary poetry, they both carve out and are carved out by a difficult niche. As with the desert animals who survive the fierce landscape, they are singular: "Nothing here matches their gift."