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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"She would say, 'Give me a list,' " Ryan says, recalling how Adair would ask which poetry publications should be targeted. They'd send out 100 poems, and Adair would say, "Let's hope for one of a hundred." Tired of her partner "complaining about my work stacking up," Adair organized a group of friends to sponsor the private publication of Ryan's first book.

In 2004, during the brief period when San Francisco was issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Ryan and Adair got married at San Francisco City Hall. "We did it again last week" at the Marin Civic Center, Ryan says -- "it's legal statewide this time" -- on the same day, coincidentally, that she found out about the laureateship.

Even with Adair's help, Ryan says, her career path "wasn't exactly the fast track." In 1985, she placed a book with what she calls a "legitimate" publisher, the respected but tiny Copper Beech Press, but "it just was met by profound silence."

For years, she tried to get picked up by a bigger publishing house. A near miss at what was then Harper & Row left her "absolutely dashed." In 1994, when she finally published "Flamingo Watching," the collection that includes "Turtle," it was once again with Copper Beech, and Ryan was "profoundly discouraged" to think that nine years of work would once again go unnoticed.

But it didn't. Gradually, "Flamingo Watching" got read, and Ryan became at least vaguely visible in the poetry world. Since then, she has published three more collections with Grove Press.

One who discovered her was the poet and critic Dana Gioia, now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. As he wrote in a 1998 essay published in the Dark Horse literary magazine, Gioia got a review copy of "Flamingo Watching," read a few poems and found himself returning to the book again and again.

He was struck "by the unusual compression and density of Ryan's work." Her poems and her individual lines both tend to be short, but they are packed with meaning. Like Emily Dickinson, Gioia wrote, Ryan "has found a way of exploring ideas without losing either the musical impulse or imaginative intensity necessary to lyric poetry."

Today, Gioia calls Ryan simply "one of the finest poets writing in America," adding that she has "the gift of being simultaneously very funny and very wise."

Ryan herself doesn't have much to say about the lengths of the poems: "I just go till I've got it done."

As for the shortness of her lines, she says, "I like a lot of exposure. A word on either end of a line has exposure. I like the danger of that." She also loves to bury rhyme, rather than stick to end rhymes and notes that "short lines cause the rhyme to bounce around."

She tries to achieve "the quality of lightness" in her poems. She is aiming for "substance that evaporates," poetry not as a burden but as something "rising, entering the air. I want it to make us feel like we're taking in more oxygen when we breathe."

Ryan became seriously visible in 2004, when she won both a Guggenheim fellowship and the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. All this, and now the poet laureateship: While the laureate's official duties are minimal, recent holders of the office have taken it upon themselves to try to boost poetry's standing in the nation's cultural life.

Did she have to think twice about accepting the position, she is asked, given her lifelong desire to focus more on her writing than on being a public figure in the poetry world?

"I did," Ryan says. "I was afraid of sacrificing the good opinion of Emily Dickinson by being 'public, like a frog.' "