Great Thoughts

I’ve just discovered Kay Ryan. Well, really, I’ve heard about her for years, picked up her books and rejected them a dozen times, and now, finally, I’m captivated and compelled by her precision and minimalism. I’m thinking about Ryan, along with Rae Armantrout and Heather McHugh, in preparation to review a few other new books. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the lack of representation of women in literary journals, MFA program faculty and the like (for example, here in Slate). I think there’s some vague sense that women get MFAs because they have free time after (or when) they raise families and need to "express themselves" thus have only introverted and domestic, not Serious poems. This triumvirate of serious, funny and cerebral ladies should disabuse anyone of such presuppositions.

Today, I’m just thinking about Ryan, but the rest of the authors might come up in my public reviews. In Ryan’s more famous book, I entirely missed the poignancy and comic seriousness of the first, title poem “Say Uncle.” Now, I feel it and it hurts – like a strained lower back. It pulls you up in this truly painful way but with such suddenness and excess that you laugh at your own incapacity.

The poem that really got me, though, in my current disagreement with philosophy was this one:

Great Thoughts

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus,
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

Ryan sets up confusing and then counter-intuitive analogy. Why would one think that great thoughts do nourish as parents do children? Then, before explaining, she frames a second analogy: instead of like children, the thoughts are like the eucalyptus. What? The reader as yet has no idea what kind of great thoughts she means or what qualities they could share with that tree (scent? dusty greenness?). The next two lines resolve both apparent false analogies: great thoughts clear a space beneath themselves, perhaps poisoning the ground, perhaps taking its nutrients (I’m not quite sure how it works with eucalyptus: with black walnuts, it’s a poison.) So, well, gosh – the end of the poem tells me – it is awful here, next to great thoughts, if you aren’t having one, or worse, if you are trying to grow one, then, there’s no room. You must go to the fringe of the meadow and sow your seeds if you want any sunlight or soil.

That's where I'm headed, I hope.