Verse of the Turtle

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'The Edges of Time'

Poet laureate Kay Ryan reads one of her works.

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Take, for example, the time when, alone with a group of adults, she found herself describing "my sixth-grade teacher's bottom jiggling as she wrote on the blackboard."

"I caused a woman to spit her milk across the table," she recalls.

At UCLA, the poems she submitted were judged not to meet the poetry club's standards. She "leaped away, mortally stung," and afterward "stayed pretty remote from the joining business." Bachelor's and master's degrees in hand, she ended up teaching remedial English part time at the College of Marin -- a job she would keep for decades because it allowed her time to write. She wasn't yet seeing herself as a true poet, however.

That changed when she took a cross-country bike trip in 1976.

She was 30. Poetry, she had started to realize, was possessing her mind. Sentences had started rhyming in her head -- "the machine was going without my permission" -- and she wasn't happy about it. She understood that writing poetry "means that one is totally exposed. It requires everything of the writer." She wasn't sure she wanted to be that exposed.

Mulling this as she pedaled up 3,500-foot Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she found herself slipping into a kind of boundary-free mental state. There were "no borders to me, no borders to anything," she explains, and she seized the opportunity to pose the question that had been troubling her:

"Should I be a writer?"

Back came an answering question that made everything clear:

"Do you like it?"

Yes, she did.

This didn't mean, of course, that making it happen was going to be easy. Back in California, still shying away from difficult themes "like heart," Ryan assigned herself a task: She would get out a pack of tarot cards, turn one card over every day and write a poem from it. "So I had to start dealing with these abstractions like love, death, the wheel of fortune."

It took her eight years to get a poem accepted at a serious poetry magazine and 10 more to get into the New Yorker. Ryan says she doesn't know how she could have endured the rejection without Carol Adair, the woman with whom she's shared her life for close to 30 years. They met when both were teaching classes at San Quentin State Prison.