Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose

by Kay Ryan

Overview

The first-ever collection of essays by one of our most distinguished and distinctive poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan

Synthesizing Gravity gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan’s probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art.

A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets— including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson— Synthesizing Gravity bristles with Ryan’s crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and her appetite and appreciation for the genuine. Among essays like “Radiantly Indefensible,” “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks,” and “The Abrasion of Loneliness,” are piquant pieces on the virtues of emptiness, forgetfulness, and other under-loved concepts. Edited and with an introduction by Christian Wiman, this generous collection of Ryan’s distinctive thinking gives us a surprising look into the mind of an American master.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802148186
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	214,919
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Kay Ryan is a lifetime Californian whose honors include the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Obama. She served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate and is a former MacArthur Fellow.

Editorial Reviews

Synthesizing Gravity is a delight, if a tart and idiosyncratic one…There is no mystical bombast here whatsoever. Indeed, there is very nearly the opposite, delivered by a writer with a full command of the English sentence and an electric talent for metaphor.

The New York Times Book Review - David Orr

★ 01/13/2020

Pulitzer-winner and former U.S. poet laureate Ryan (Elephant Rocks) delivers a brilliant essay collection. Each entry is an exploration into poetry, whether Ryan is revealing her own idiosyncrasies as a writer or considering the lives of poets, such as the eccentric Stevie Smith. Sympathetic to Smith’s celebration of the outwardly placid life of “regular habits,” Ryan warns fellow poets against favoring superficial novelty and tritely picturesque “Kodak” memories in their work, cautioning, “We must be less in love with foreground if we want to see far.” Meanwhile, in “A Consideration of Poetry,” she explains the inherent comedy in poetry. Her critical prose eloquently exposes a poem’s deeper meaning, looking, for instance, at how Gerard Manley Hopkins reshapes language in his poem “Spring and Fall.” Most remarkable is Ryan’s ability to illuminate in an unpretentious manner writers including Jorges Luis Borges, whose This Craft of Verse contains a “constant feeling of blurring, or interpenetration, of categories.” Much like her description of poet William Bronk’s work, this collection proves “there are moments of aesthetic transport which weld beauty to beauty, occasional angles which offer a glimpse of something endless and compelling.” For poetry enthusiasts and skeptics alike, this will be an inviting portal into the mind of one of America’s greatest living writers. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-12-18
The Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. poet laureate considers her craft and inspirations with a smirk and the occasional dash of snark.

The essays and reviews in Ryan's (Erratic Facts, 2015, etc.) first prose collection reveal a careful poet who's also careful not to take her job too seriously. Quite often, she responds with bemusement—if not outright laughter—at the confusions and ironies in work she admires, laughter being "one of the body's natural responses to shock." Marianne Moore's abstracted verse is "at once ridiculous and immensely cheering"; Wallace Stevens' poems "have a hilarity that isn't funny, a joie without the vivre"; Annie Dillard is "hilarious...the terrible child experimenting upon the innocent parental flesh." Reading the puckish Stevie Smith, Ryan declares, "it gives me so much hope, to see language get pantsed." None of which is to say that the author is dismissive of understanding poetry in sophisticated ways; the book is rich in close readings of works by Smith, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Philip Larkin. Plus, her choices of metaphor are delicious: Moore's inscrutable lines land "in one's lap like inedible melons," and she herself is a "pig for pleasure." However, she also cultivates a sensibility of not wanting to delve too deeply into poems lest their magic be spoiled. That's reasonable, up to the point where she takes it out on other writers, from a gentle chastisement of those who keep notebooks to a more aggressive field report from a writers' conference, in which she felt an "abstract contempt for everyone in attendance." Ryan's love of poetry is palpable and intense, but she approaches writing about it as if it were, well, a bit of a joke. When it comes to poetry, she writes that "in order to listen we must be a little bit relieved of the intention to understand."

An impassioned, sometimes prickly tribute to the poet's art.

Kirkus Reviews

PRAISE FOR SYNTHESIZING GRAVITY



“Synthesizing Gravity is a delight, if a tart and idiosyncratic one... There is no mystical bombast here whatsoever. Indeed, there is very nearly the opposite, delivered by a writer with a full command of the English sentence and an electric talent for metaphor... [I]f Ryan gives us a view through a keyhole, it’s a view often made richer by its constraints.”—New York Times



“Reading Ryan’s writing will charge and recharge the mind. This is the first collection of nonfiction from Ryan, a national treasure.... [and] a wonderful entry point to her work.”—San Francisco Chronicle



“Brilliant...For poetry enthusiasts and skeptics alike, this will be an inviting portal into the mind of one of America’s greatest living writers.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)



“Damn fine prose ... What a wonderful voice [Ryan] displays... She’s a kind of wisecracking philosopher, a truly original thinker, a quantum physicist of space who also, clearly, knows how her own clear voice sounds better than when alone.”—John Freeman, "Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2020"



"An eminent American poet turns to prose to illuminate her craft and her life... You will come away from [Kay Ryan's] refreshing Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose—her first collection of nonfiction—with a deeper appreciation of poetry's worth."—Shelf Awareness



Praise for Kay Ryan:
“[Ryan] has the uncanny ability to construct a tiny word-mechanism that produces the experience of genuine wonder.” —Washington Post



“Everything [Ryan’s] eye falls upon takes on a brisk, beautifully complete clarity. Her tidy lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal warmth: a ferocious capacity for finding the essence of things.” —Los Angeles Times



“Ryan’s poems are consistent delights. . . [they] are what Robert Frost said all poems must be, momentary stays against confusion.” —San Francisco Chronicle



“{Ryan] excels at aphoristic wit, yet reveals an intensity of emotion . . . You won’t find any clutter in her work, which never fails to surprise, enlighten and delight.” —Newsday



“You can’t help consuming [her] poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back—what was that?—and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you.” —New York Times



“Ryan's poems are witty, reserved, unprepossessing, impersonal, small-scale, as well as short-lined, practical rather than spiritual, never boastful.”—Guardian



“Melancholy lucidity is Ryan’s greatest gift.” —New Yorker

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