July 18, 2008


Kay Ryan: “I so didn’t want to be a poet…”

Thus saith the US’s new Poet Laureate:

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

posted by Andrew Simone in poetry 

comments

2 Responses to “Kay Ryan: “I so didn’t want to be a poet…””

  1. Kris on July 18th, 2008 at 4:56 pm

    Poetry as a disease?

    I can see that.

  2. Sheila Ryan on July 18th, 2008 at 6:27 pm

    Oh, Kris, I can’t. I can’t see poetry as a phenomenon situated anywhere along the spectrum to which people at this point in history affix the markers Disease and Health.

    It’s not poetry then, is it?

    (Of course, I realize Kay Ryan [no relation] was speaking of a compulsion specific to her own habits and manners. Which, incidentally, I find a most telling point.)

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