Poet Kay Ryan Named MacArthur Fellow
Genius awards come with $500,000 grant
September 21, 2011
Kay Ryan has been named one of 22 new MacArthur fellows.
The high honors come as a bit of a surprise to the poet herself, who was raised in what she calls the “glamor-free, ocean-free, hot, stinky, oil-rich, potato-rich” San Joaquin Valley of California.
“I have to say that I didn’t want to be a poet and I still feel pretty embarrassed about it in a lot of situations because it seemed like putting on airs," Ryan says. "But I found that poetry was nonetheless possessing my mind. Like, if I read a book and it was prose, the prose would start rhyming, and it was kind of a little insanity taking me over.”
Ryan’s poems often explore every day human emotions such as hope, doubt and fear. She has a fluid, soaring imagination, as we see in the poem,“Killing Time.”
Time is rubbery.
If you hide it
in the shrubbery
it will wait
will winter and
wash back out
with the rainwater.
You will find it
on your steps again
like the newspaper.
Time compresses.
Stuff it in the
couch corner and
it will spring out
some night or other
when you have guests.
One of whom guesses.
Time stretches.
Then it snaps back
leaving bare patches
that didn’t happen.
Abandoned time hardens
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