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A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets— including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson— Synthesizing Gravity bristles with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.

"Synthesizing Gravity is a delight, if a tart and idiosyncratic one . . . If Ryan gives us a view through a keyhole, it's a view often made richer by its constraints." —The New York Times Book Review

"Reading Ryan's writing will charge and recharge the mind . . . 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." —John Freeman, "Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802148186
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Pages:	208
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.

Table of Contents

Introduction Christian Wiman 1

I

A Consideration of Poetry 15

Derichment 37

I Go to AWP 45

Specks 74

Notes on the Danger of Notebooks 94

Do You Like It? 111

II

The Authority of Lightness 117

Inedible Melons 133

Fidget and Gnash 158

I Demand to Speak with God 167

Wang-Pang-Woo-Poo-Woof-Woof 183

The Trail of the Hunted Wolf 191

Only Doubts 197

Flying 206

The Abrasion of Loneliness 217

III

On a Poem by Hopkins 223

Radiantly Indefensible 231

All Love All Beauty 239

On a Poem by Dickinson 245

No Time for Anything but Repetition 248

The End of the Party 250

All the Nothing 253

Listening to Williams 258

Con and Pro 263

IV

The Double 271

Reading before Breakfast 275

To Be Miniature Is to Be Swallowed by a Miniature Whale 280

Against Influence 285

On Forgetting 290

The Edges of Time 293

The Poet Takes a Walk 295

My House 299

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

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

From the Publisher

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