Fit Meat for a Hungry Mind

By KAY RYAN

 

I’ve always bristled when it’s been suggested that my work has been “influenced” by this or that poet. Sometimes the suggestion is laughably wrong — a poet I have never read let alone attempted to ventriloquize — and other times it’s really true but no more useful 

than saying I’d been influenced by being a mammal. That is: true, but not distinguishing. Still, the question of influence remains an interesting one.

 

When I first became aware of the exhilarations of poetry as a community college freshman on the Mojave Desert, the poets who moved me were immaculately remote from my world. That was one of their attractions: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit priest, so incantatory I could barely understand him; John Donne, priest again, even earlier in the British lineage, and glorious crafter of something called c o n c e i t s.  

 

Lots of British priests in the poetry business, it looked like. Plus Emily Dickinson. I loved the strenuousness of it all, the rigors, the long lonely vigil of it, the doomed quality. Here, I thought, is fit meat for the mind. And the fact was that my mind was very hungry. Hungry minds — the selfish, burrowing, opportunistic minds of the young who will rip the flesh off anything that might feed them — these are the salvation of writers. I often think about this, how the readers who keep writing alive are comically self-serving; they are trying to find access to their own brains, some way in, some key to make their own heads work. They rummage and plunder with catholic zeal, accidentally performing a service to culture that no number of academics or disinterested readers could accomplish. They have demonstrated one more time how great literature keeps on freeing minds to do other things.

 

For me, pretty early, Frost worked. Not all of him — I have never had the temperament for long narratives — but it doesn’t take much. Let us consider the briefest of his lyrics. 

 

Look at the nerve of this:

Frost has written this so limpidly that it would be possible to look right through it.  That is, it would be possible to think that it was nothing special, instantly understandable and as quickly dismissed.

 

Stanza 1: A crow in a tree knocks snow down on the speaker.

 

Stanza 2: This tiny event shifts things inside the speaker.

 

Plus the poem rhymes: conventional rhymes in predictable places. Well, except maybe mood/rued.

 

This is just about the most exciting thing a poet can do: tread the edge of the banal.  How close to nothing can he get and stay on the big side of nothing? Because the big side is really big. Borderless.

 

If we were to think of this little Frost poem as “conventional, predictable, dismissible,” it would be something like Frost’s own “day I had rued.” That is, we would feel bored with it in advance of reading it, as Frost “rues” his day before he’s finished it.  

 

Except! Something dumps something on our head and we get that little Zen slap and it’s all funny and broken up. We suddenly see that the conventions of the little poem, the predictability of crow/snow, heart/part, the whole little thing, is the thinnest shell around a mystery that we all know and that nevertheless remains a mystery: everything can shift at any instant. The poem does what the crow did. It cracks heads.

 

Frost is sneaky. While seeming to be quietly faithful to some quaint New England scene, he is actually stripping away every bit of extraneous color: the poem winds up as simple as a Japanese ink study. There is great energy available if you can stimulate the reader’s conventional expectations and then hijack them. That’s where the life always is, right as you walk under the tree expecting more New England and getting Japan instead.

 

The explosion of freedom inside the poem is pure neutral freedom, not named Frost or named anything; it’s denatured and become perfectly useful by an opposite temperament. 

 

And this is what takes the onus off the idea of “influence.” The thing that really sticks from a great poet like Frost isn’t the snow and harness bells or the rest of it; it’s the immense enduring enterprise of reclaiming freedom for himself poem by poem, how — like Hopkins or Donne or Dickinson — Frost was saving himself, and that saving always has a necessary dispatch — speed, impatience, relentlessness, stubbornness — that hooks it to all the other savings, until it’s not influence at all but a shared ionized something.

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Two poems by Kay Ryan