November Poet: Kay Ryan, Pt 2

Continuing on with the Poet of the Month, Kay Ryan.

Ryan's awards for poetry include (among many others) the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation in 2004; a Guggenheim fellowship the same year; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; the Union League Poetry Prize in 2000; and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1995. One of her poems, How Birds Sing, is permanently installed at the Central Park Zoo in New York City.

From a New York Times article: You can’t help consuming Kay Ryan’s poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back — what was that? — and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you.

That's one of the things I enjoy about her poems. You read them and it may take a minute or a day or a week but all of a sudden the meaning sinks in and you realize how amazingly sly and witty she's been in saying it. I like that!

On a somewhat unrelated note I have to say that I'm quite ashamed of myself. I type about 95 wpm. Instead of typing in this very short poem, I found it online and cut/pasted. I think I've reached new heights of laziness.

This poem is from the book Niagara River.

Hide and Seek

It’s hard not
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It’s
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It’s
like some form
of skin’s developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.