@tinyroofnail Love Kay Ryan, especially at her most economical. Here’s one I shared on my daily(ish) poem list not too long ago:
Spiderweb
From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.
—Kay Ryan
—found in The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010)
@chrislott Yes! I love that one. We’re reading the same collection. I think I saw when you posted it the first time and meant to comment. Have you read any of her prose? I just finished a collection of short essays called Synthesizing Gravity and loved it
@tinyroofnail I’m going to have to get that collection; I’ve never read anything of Kay Ryan’s work except her poetry. No reason for it, just never got around to it. The little excerpt you shared sold me on it. Marianne Moore should be more prominent than she is.
Speaking of Moore, I came across this just a few days ago in My Lost Poets by Philip Levine:
> Years later I heard him [Thom Gunn] laugh over a long-remembered reading by Marianne Moore; he claimed he didn’t know when she was explaining the poem, examining her life, gossiping, or simply reading what was on the page. After a while he thought her explanations—which often came in the middle of the poem—were merely the portions of the poem she’d neglected to write.