Kay Ryan (b. 1945) was born in California, where she has lived in Marin County since 1971, teaching at a community college. She was the USA’s Poet Laureate 2008–10, and The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. When an interviewer asked about page vs stage, Ryan said, ‘I really love the exchange with an audience. I love generating a kind of sense of rapport and a sense that we are understanding these things together, that we are doing these things together. I hate leaving an audience out or leaving them behind, just talking at them; I want to engage them. Of course, the paradox is that if a poem is an interesting poem it’s not going to be gotten that way, you know? Some portion of it will be exchanged, but it is still going to remain a mysterious object and is still going to require or invite private contemplation. […] I think that my main interest in poetry is that I read it silently. I mean I don’t even like to go to poetry readings. I like to give them but not attend, because I like to read the work and I want the voice in my brain to do the work.’1
25 March 2010 at 10:41
Dear Kay
Your book arrived this morning (I am off home to Mexico for a fortnight tomorrow). It has played havoc with my busy preparations. I love it. Unfortunately my editor Judith Willson has commandeered it to read while I am away. We must think how we are going to do your British book. We very much want to bring your work out here.
Thank you for sending it! And for writing it, of course.
All best
Michael
26 March 2010 at 23:44
Dear Michael,
Have a lovely time in Mexico, and I’m delighted with your enthusiasm for the work and eager to get thinking.
Best,
Kay
[June 2010]
Dear Kay
I have been loving your book, and I have the Board’s permission despite a very full 2011 to slot our Kay Ryan into August of next year. Judith Willson, who will be your editor, and I are certainly pleased about this.
We now need to determine how we will play a variation on THE BEST OF IT so as to differentiate it from the American edition and give you a bespoke British and European aspect.
I suggest that we consider adding an interview at the end and perhaps a preface/introduction by a poet you and we regard highly who is also well known on this side of the water. One name immediately comes to mind…
Let me know if you have another idea. And whom should we be writing to about rights and setting? Have you an editor at Grove for us to approach?
Please reply to me and to Judith at the same time and we will begin assembling the European You.
Kind regards
Michael
7 June 2010 at 16:16
Dear Michael and Judith (hello Judith),
This is great news. And I will really look forward to British publication. I’m very honored to think you have worked the book into your very full 2011 line-up. This is a good time for me to be thinking about a project like this, with the laureateship winding down this month. As I may or may not already have said, I have always cherished the hope that the people of the sceptered isle would like my poems. For so long they seemed so not quite American that I hoped maybe they were British.
Now, as to how to make this book distinctive. An introduction by someone distinguished would of course be wonderful. As to an interview, I can see how one might friendly-up the book, but I always feel so frustrated and trapped in them. An interview is so much less than the thing itself; I can feel myself dismantling the force of the work as I jabber away. One thing we might possibly consider is making the book shorter – The Best, Boiled. Or perhaps longer: The Best, Bloated.2 Well, we can think seriously about these things soon, but I didn’t want to wait any longer before telling you how happy I am that this is really going to happen.
Regarding rights, I haven’t mentioned this to my American publisher Grove/Atlantic, and I have two names for you to contact there. The first is my own editor, Joan Bingham, Executive Editor, and the second is Eric Price, Executive Vice President, Associate Publisher & COO, who deals with contracts.
I look forward to getting into all of this a lot more. And Judith, I certainly look forward to working with you.
Very best wishes,<
Kay
*
PN Review published poems by Kay Ryan in 1984. Her book was over two decades away, conceived for a British readership, a selected poems with a substantial helping of new and previously uncollected poems. The poem ‘Wash’ – about hanging out laundry – answers Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ ode: ‘No Glory has passed / from the Earth, old man.’ It concluded with a memorable image:
I will begin you again
Pin you by the beard and habits
Pull ears out of your pockets.
Judith Aronson, Likenesses: with notable sitters writing about each other
John Ash, In the Wake of the Day
John Ashbery, Collected Poems 1956–1987
Anthony Astbury (ed), A Field of Large Desires: a Greville Press anthology 1975–2010
James K. Baxter, Selected Poems, edited by Paul Millar
Lucie Brock-Broido, Soul Keeping Company
Sarah Broom, Tigers at Awhitu
Dan Burt and Paul Hodgson, Cold Eye
David Constantine, Robyn Marsack and Bernard O’Donoghue (eds), Oxford Poets 2010: an anthology
Ernest Farres, Edward Hopper, translated by T. Lawrence Venuti
Elaine Feinstein, Cities
Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End: Volume I: Some Do Not, edited by Max Saunders
Nigel Forde, The Choir Outing
John Gallas, Forty Lies
Louise Glück, A Village Life
Robert Graves and Joshua Podro, The Nazarene Gospel Restored, edited by John Presley
Robert Graves, Translating Rome, edited by Robert Cummings
Edward Hirsch, The Living Fire: new and selected poems 1975–2010
Evan Jones and Todd Swift (eds), Modern Canadian Poets: an anthology of poems in English
Gabriel Josipovici, Heart’s Wings
Patrick McGuinness, Jilted City
Andrew McNeillie, In Mortal Memory
Kei Miller, A Light Song of Light
David Morley, Enchantment
Les Murray, Taller When Prone
Jody Allen Randolph (ed), Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland
Tom Raworth, Windmills in Flames: old and new poems
Anthony Rudolf, Zigzag
Fiona Sampson, Rough Music
Peter Sansom, Selected Poems
Robert Saxton, Hesiod’s Calendar: a version of Hesiod, ‘Theogony’ and ‘Works and Days’
Philip Terry, Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Emilio Rui Vilar (ed), Environment at the Crossroads: aiming for a sustainable future
John Whale, Waterloo Teeth
W.B. Yeats, The First Years: poems by W.B. Yeats, 1889–1899, edited by Edward Larrissy