She's a Poet, an Artist, and Oh Yeah, A Small Town Lesbian

Submitted by Anon.


A shout out to, and hopefully inspiration for, all the artists striving to help create a better world ... Especially the Artists of Venango County!

ps - How did the American "Family" Association let this one slip by without threatening, uh, something ... ?

from The New York Times, 7/17/08

Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate

By Patricia Cohen

When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1994, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

Still, she has remained something of an outsider. More ...

And, from The Washington Post, 7/17/08

Verse of the Turtle
Taking On the Role of Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan Sticks Her Neck Out

By Bob Thompson

More than a decade and a half ago, despairing that her poems would ever find an audience, Kay Ryan found herself writing one about a turtle. It was about as personal as a Kay Ryan poem ever gets.

Ryan's appointment as the nation's new poet laureate, to be announced today by Librarian of Congress James Billington, will cap one of the most unusual careers in American letters. Hers is "a very original poetic voice," Billington says, "almost the antithesis of the things you hear booming at you every day."

Yet when she wrote the concluding lines of "Turtle," Ryan evoked a deeply pessimistic vision of her life's work:

. . . She lives

Below luck level, never imagining some lottery

Will change her load of pottery to wings.

Her only levity is patience,

The sport of truly chastened things.

Still a bit stunned to have risen so far above luck level, Ryan can't resist joking about her newly exalted status.

"I thought I might take it upon myself to prevent all bad poetry from being published during my reign," she says, speaking by phone from her home north of San Francisco, when asked if there is any special project she plans to undertake in her new role.

Then she tries to explain how a poet laureateship could happen to a 62-year-old woman who grew up in the small towns of central California ("the glamour-free zone"), learned to hide behind the role of class clown, got rejected by her college's poetry club, committed to writing poetry as a vocation only after she'd turned 30, refused to have anything to do with creative writing classes and has lived a deliberately quiet life in which she didn't cultivate connections within the literary establishment.

Her father was an oil well driller who died reading a get-rich-quick book when she was 19. Her mother did some elementary school teaching, but you couldn't describe the household as literary. Asked about the origin of her poetic impulse, Ryan talks about learning, as a child, that language "could have a powerful effect on others."

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.

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