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Kay Ryan Biography

Kay Ryan (born September 21, 1945) is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.

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Kay Ryan Quotes

If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or know what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us,
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double, how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need?

Latent, Loss, Names, Self, Step

Failure: the renewable resource.

Failure, Renewable, Renewable Resources, Resource, Resources

The only real access that I have to my mind is when I'm writing.

Access, Mind, Real, Writing

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. "Hide and Seek

Air, Alone, Long, Waiting

Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable. A place with its own harvest.

Harvest, Place, Possible, Waiting

The day misspent, the love misplaced, has inside it the seed of redemption. Nothing is exempt from resurrection.

Exempt, Love, Misplaced, Redemption, Resurrection, Seed

Forgetting takes space.
Forgotten matters displace
as much anything else as
anything else. We must
skirt unlabeled crates
as thought it made sense
and take them when we go
to other states.

Forgetting, Matter, Skirts, Space, Take, Unlabeled

A lot of the job that one has to do as a writer is to protect the thing that doesn't match the world.

Jobs, Match, Protect, World, Writer

As for reality, I don't even have any interest in that word.

Interest, Reality, Word

What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing. My major sense organ is apparently a pencil.

Keeps, Know, Knows, Organs, Sense, Writing

Tenderness and Rot Tenderness and rot share a border. And rot is an aggressive neighbor whose iridescence keeps creeping over. No lessons can be drawn from this however. One is not two countries. One is not meat corrupting. It is important to stay sweet and loving.

Country, Creeping, Neighbor, Sweet, Tenderness, Two

Action creates
a taste
for itself.

Action, Taste

It seems like many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I’m absolutely not interested in that. It made sense to me to be as whole and well as I could be, and as happy. I wanted to see what a fortunate life would produce. What writing would come out of a mind that didn’t try to torment itself? What did I have to know? What did I have to do rather than what can I torment and bend myself into doing? What was the fruit on that tree?

Crazy, Know, Produce, Thinking, Whole, Writing

I don't think any poetry is written that isn't primarily written to the self, in a way. . . I'm always talking to myself. But I seem to want somebody else to listen to it. I need, I do want an audience. So it's a strange thing. It's a very private conversation that then, you make public, kind of, like, the starfish flipping its stomach out.

Like, Self, Talking, Thinking

The satisfactions
of agreement are
immediate as sugar--
a melting of the
granular, a syrup
that lingers, shared
not singular.
Many prefer it.

Agreement, Lingers, Melting, Prefer, Syrup

A too closely watched flower
blossoms the wrong color.
Excess attention to the jonquil
turns it gentian. Flowers
need it tranquil to get
their hues right. Some
only open at midnight.

Color, Flower, Gentian, Hues, Midnight, Tranquil