Interview With Kay Ryan
Online, April 28, 2012 (Newswire.com) - On Sunday, May 13, Kay Ryan will read for the Katonah Poetry Series. The reading will take place at Katonah Village Library.
Ryan served as United States Poet Laureate from 2008-2010. In 2011 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was the recipient of a $500,000 MacArthur "Genius" Award. About her work, J.D. McClatchy has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost."
Kay Ryan will be the 15th Pulitzer Prize winner to appear in the 45-year history of the Katonah Poetry Series.
Here's an excerpt from a frank and revealing interview with Katonah Poetry's Andy Kuhn:
AK: Do you think of yourself as a moralist?
KR: I don't think of myself as a moralist, although I have said sometimes that I was a faux-moralist. I think of myself as somebody trying to figure things out. I'm thinking, I'm just thinking. I'm interested in things that I just barely know-I have a little hint, a little wisp of something. And what interests me is that thing that I hardly know and probably hardly can know. But what I tend to do, I magnify it. I make it big, I say it more strongly, I maybe make it somewhat cartoon-like, in an effort to make its outlines clearer.
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AK: You've talked about the poets who you call the "talking-back poets," about how "they get much of their energy from disagreeing or taking exception." You put Robert Frost at the top of the list.
KR: Oh yeah. Emily Dickinson's another one, giant talking-back poet.
AK: Who did you start out talking back to, and who are you talking back to these days?
KR: All the smart guys. And talking back doesn't necessarily mean disagreeing, but it might mean picking out a line or two . . . . Somebody I've been reading a lot recently is Montaigne. I'm a late-life convert to Montaigne. I've been reading Walter Benjamin. I love to read Milan Kundera-his essays though, not his fiction. And I love to read Calvino, his essays. I had a giant jag for many years reading Nabokov. Brodsky-oh, lots of fun with Brodsky. Essays, again.
Read the full interview here. http://katonahpoetry.com/interviews/interview-with-kay-ryan/