Further to my Friday post, I wanted to point out that Kay Ryan’s webcast from last week has now been put online, here. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
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November 7, 2008 at 2:48 am
I fortunately saw Kay Ryan on Charlie Rose tonite… her poems are fastidiously contracted… she captures the kettle just at initial boiling point, the first silver bubble breaking surface becomes her poetry’s first word-bloom, ignoring the roil of water as typical subject. Enviously spectacular was her “…blandeur…” suggesting with covert alpha emphasis that “grandeur” should really be less so, because it must be so in this age of everything is of such huge significance that that very self-hugeness diminishes itself. I am delighted to have heard her read her poems… she reads with enormous understatement, a paradigm of contradictioness that I liken to the natural liquor of the ocean upon a raw oyster… she is the only culinary sage whose work invents natural liquors to flavor her words… that is truly an ultimate paradigm of contradictioness… a wordsmithing miracle I can attribute only to Shakespeare or Joyce or Wallace Stevens… and now Kay Ryan. Less embellished, of course, more “turtle” of course, but all the more elegantly and flagrantly, with sublime quietude, worthy of any medal coined to celebrate a superb poet.