Sherry Chandler

From the New York Times:

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.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to Kay Ryan’s poetry until I heard her read at West Chester last year. I found her reading style wonderfully wry and funny and her work just wonderful.

I also sat next to her at one of the readings at that conference but alas, none of her talent rubbed off though I rubbed shoulders. I could no more match Ryan’s minimalism than I could match Naomi Nye’s expansiveness. But I am very very glad both poets are in my world.

Here is Ryan’s page at Poets.org, where you can read some of her work if you don’t already know it. I see that they have “Home to Roost,” her famous 9/11 poem, except that it’s not, as David Orr points out in the current issue of Poetry:

The only problem, of course, is that “Home to Roost” was written prior to September 11 and has nothing whatsoever to do with the attack, its aftermath, or the now-famous invocation of this specific phrase by Jeremiah Wright. Ryan enjoys tweaking clichés, but when a particular cliché is thrown into political relief—as often happens—then her poem tends to follow. It’ll be another five years before she can call this one her own again, which probably annoys her endlessly.

It’s good that Ryan has been named Poet Laureate because she is a fine and “accessible” poet, but also because she’s a woman. As Amy King points out here, Ryan will be only the 10th woman out of 45 poets to hold the office since 1937.

1945-1946 — Louise Bogan
1948-1949 — Leonie Adams
1949-1950 — Elizabeth Bishop
1971-1973 — Josephine Jacobsen
1981-1982 — Maxine Kumin
1985-1986 — Gwendolyn Brooks
1992-1993 — Mona Van Duyn
1993-1995 — Rita Dove
2003-2004 — Louise Glück
2008 — Kay Ryan

Here’s the best photo I’ve seen of Kay Ryan. I stole it from Poesy Galore:

From Lisa Levy, An Original Adventure, in The Believer:

…Hardwick’s genius was not limited to private letters [Ed note: These would be the private letters her husband Robert Lowell made public in his confressional poetry]. She too got to create herself, as a novelist, a teacher, and, most powerfully, as a critic. The bones of her biography are a classic fish-out-of-water tale, a Kentucky belle in the big city, but Hardwick was more like Walt Whitman tending the wounded in the Civil War hospital than Scarlett O’Hara at the Twelve Oaks barbecue—after all, she had a husband who needed constant bandaging (straitjacketing, really). Nevertheless she was a Southerner in the north; even though Hardwick didn’t put much stock in the idea that we “all are linked naturally to their regions,” as she wrote in her novel Sleepless Nights (1979), she does think “it is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live.” New York was hers, as Nights makes abundantly clear. Jim Lewis observes in his tribute to her on Slate.com that she was “one of the last survivors of a group of extraordinary women, many from the West or the South, who redefined the American essay: Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and M.F.K. Fisher, all from California, Mary McCarthy from Seattle.” She certainly harbored geographical ambitions. Her New York Times obituary recounts one from an interview in 1979: “My aim was to be a New York Jewish Intellectual. I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me—and their openness to European culture.” Thus it is a bit twisted that though she floated among the Rahvs and the Kazins, the man she married was the deepest indigo of Boston blue bloods; and the analytical quality she associated with Semitism was not totally absent, but not dominant, in Robert Lowell, casually nicknamed “Cal” (for Caliban and Caligula, and for his tendency toward decadence and excess) by his prep-school chums. Yet anyone who ever read a word she wrote knows she did not suffer in silence. Hardwick remade herself as a New Yorker, but her feeling that she was never of the world she lived in, neither a real Jewish Intellectual nor at home with the Cabots and the Lodges, helped her find an original voice.

Hardwick died last December 2. Here is her obit from The Guardian:

Elizabeth Hardwick, who has died aged 91, was for nearly half a century a prominent figure in New York’s literary and cultural life. She was probably best known for her essays and her autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights (1979). But she was also famous for the company she kept. With her then husband, the poet Robert Lowell, she was one of the group of left-liberal intellectuals who founded the New York Review of Books in 1963. Her friends included such writers as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Roth, as well as influential figures in the publishing world such as Philip Rahv and Jason Epstein.

Hardwick came to New York from the hinterlands. She was born into a large family in Kentucky, a southern border state that tends to produce literary sensibilities very different from those that flourish in the deep south. Her father was a left-leaning blue-collar worker who ran a plumbing and heating business. No doubt it contributed to her alienation from the mint julep school of southern writing that she was a city girl, from Lexington.

After graduating from the University of Kentucky and taking an MA in English, Hardwick moved to New York, where she studied briefly at Columbia University and set up as a freelance writer.

Here is her bibliography at the New York Review of Books.

And her bio at the KyLit site.

Obviously my interest here is the Kentucky connection, but I must wonder whether Hardwick would have wanted every biosketch to begin with a description of her marital long-suffering. Nothing I’ve read about her convinces me that she was of the long-suffering school of women so there must have been more to the marriage than her service to the great man.