- Mike Force
- Kay Ryan will be at Kane Hall at the University of Washington on Thursday, May 16.
I want so much to go on a bike ride with Kay Ryan. We’d have pizza and then take my favorite route through the Arboretum, slalom between families of ducks and guys cruising in the bushes, and ride out to the middle of that abandoned tract of freeway people call the Bridge to Nowhere. We’d lean our bikes (I’ve read she favors a mountain bike) by the spot where swimmers leap 30 feet into root-beer-colored water, where someone spray-painted “jump, pussy” on the cement in pink letters. I’d open a bottle of whiskey and start our conversation with a few questions about bikes.
It was on a cross-country bike ride that Kay Ryan, then 30 years old, realized she was destined to be a writer. She had recently begun a PhD in literary criticism at UC Irvine, but as she once said in an interview, “I couldn’t bear the idea of being a doctor of something I couldn’t fix.” On this cross-country ride, she simply asked herself whether she liked writing poetry, and the answer was yes. When she returned home, she began to write, drawing inspiration, at first, from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! She was named United States poet laureate in 2008, and next week, on May 16, will deliver the 50th annual Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading at the University of Washington, in the Roethke Auditorium.
I like bikes that resemble Ryan’s poems—compact, streamlined, with an appearance of mechanical simplicity that belies their power. She often makes seemingly obvious or straightforward statements that, in the context of the poems, become complex. Similarly, she can use the same line, or nearly the same line, twice in a poem in such a way that they mean completely different things each time. For instance, in her poem “Lime Light,” the meaning of “lime light,” at first synonymous with “spotlight,” is complicated by the introduction of an actual bowl of limes. If this sounds too simple to work, consider the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or the gin and tonic, and then of course read the poem.
