Kay Ryan, interviewed in The Paris Review
It was while riding her bicycle across the country that Kay Ryan decided to become a writer. She believes there is no more aesthetic machine than the bicycle, no machine that is better for the world than the bicycle.
“I like the sound of facts, but I don’t care about them as facts. I like them as texture. As for reality, I don’t even have any interest in that word.”
“I’ve always been sickened by the whole discussion of natural tone, natural voice. Every tone, every voice is unnatural, and it is natural to be unnatural. So there’s nothing to talk about. It either works or it doesn’t work.”
“When I read my poems to any audience there’s a lot of laughing, but I always warn them that it’s a fairy gift and will turn scary when they get it home.”
“As the world’s opinion of me has elevated, my own has lowered sensibly.”
“It seems many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I’m absolutely not interested in that…. I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce. What writing would come out of a mind that didn’t try to torment itself?”
“I like to read my own poems but I don’t like to hear other people read theirs.”
“Progress–the idea of progress–doesn’t mean anything to me…I don’t have to think my books are getting better. I just want to keep going back to the same well to have another little drink.”
“I could never write fiction. I have no idea what people are thinking.”
“Edges are the most powerful parts of the poem. The more edges you have the more power you have. They make the poem more permeable, more exposed.”
“[Frost] sets the standard for clarity and the management of darkness.”
“It’s poetry’s uselessness that excites me. It’s hopelessness. All this talk of usefulness makes me feel I’ve suddenly been shanghaied into the helping professions. Prose is practical language. Conversation is practical language. Let them handle the usefulness jobs. But of course, poetry has its balms. It makes us less lonely by one. It makes us have more room inside ourselves. But it’s paralyzing to think of usefulness and poetry in the same breath.”
“The only real access I have to my mind is when I am writing.”
“[Poetry] is a way of thinking unlike any other. Brodsky considers poetry a great accelerator of the mind and I agree. Thinking takes place in language, and it’s hard to say whether the language is creating the thinking or the thinking is creating the language. If I don’t write poetry, in the profoundest way, I have to way to think.”
“I don’t know if I am interested in combating an idea or just loosening it up. You have to make some room for your mind. You have to open something up. And you can’t just slam it from the other side. You can’t say, That’s not right. This is right. You start fluffing it up. You open up the picture, so you can know two things at once.”
“Extravagance in your life takes energy from possible extravagances in your mind.”
To write is to be a bicycle mechanic.
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