Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Recognition. A word that can mean someone’s work has been honored, ‘recognized’ for excellence, but also can mean that moment when a person feels a lighting strike of connection to an artist’s work, whatever the media – that “Oh YES” that is beyond mere liking, but is instead kinship.

Kay Ryan (1945 – ) worked out her own distinctive style with little regard for how her contemporaries were doing poetry. Her method of becoming a poet is unlike any I’ve come across before. After briefly working toward a PhD in Literary Criticism, she decided she didn’t want to be “a doctor of something I couldn’t fix.” So in 1976, she set out on a 4,000-mile bicycle trip along backroads in the Western U.S. as a time to decide if she wanted to be a writer.

Ryan took a deck of Tarot cards with her, and each morning she shuffled the cards, turned one card up, and wrote a poem about whatever the card represented. Some cards came up multiple times, and others not at all. Ryan says this process gave her the habit of writing, range, and a way to deal with exposing herself. “If one is writing well, one is totally exposed. But at the same time, one has to feel thoroughly masked or protected.”

The trip taught her that writing gave her “pleasure like nothing else,” but she still had no real idea of how to go about becoming a poet. She used the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! books as her next inspiration, which taught her to “utilize the fanciful.” After writing “a gazillion” poems, Kay Ryan self-published her first collection, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends in 1983.
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TOKEN LOSS

To the dragon
any loss is total.
His rest is disrupted
if a single jewel encrusted
goblet has been stolen.
The circle of himself
in the nest of his gold
has been broken.
No loss is token.

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