Kay Ryan reads Sunday at the Music Recital Hall at UCSC.
Kay Ryan, one of the more distinguished and distinctive voices in American poetry, will be the featured guest at the Second Annual Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading this Sunday afternoon.
Marcus, who died at age 72 in 2009, was for decades Santa Cruz County’s leading poetry impresario (as well as being one of our leading poets), bringing scores of notable bards to venues large and small, thereby greatly enriching the region’s literary life. His friends and family are carrying forward his legacy by bringing such stars as Robert Hass (last year’s featured reader) and Ryan to share their work with local literature fans.
Beyond her Pulitzer Prize, Ruth Lilly Prize, a stint as U.S. poet laureate and various other honors, Ryan has carved out a notable place for herself in the poetry landscape by cultivating a lean, wry, subtly musical and wittily philosophical style that calls to mind such eccentric predecessors as Emily Dickinson and Robert Creeley while making a lyric sound that is all her own.
Her sinewy short poems could be called “metaphysical” in their explorations. They are tough-minded, often wistful yet never sentimental, with twisty rhymes that leave the reader smiling at their ironies and marveling at her lines’ elusiveness and slippery ambiguities that subvert easy comforts of understanding even as their odd wisdom echoes in the mind. She will send you home feeling slightly more alert even as you wonder what exactly it was you have just heard.
