Kay Ryan | 2010 | The Best of It
Photo by Christina Koci Hernandez Kay Ryan is the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Her work has drawn comparisons to Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, and like these poets, Ryan's masterfully concise poems fuse acute observation of the physical world with equally sharp introspection; they are both funny and dark, playful and ready to strike. She has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and is one of the fourteen Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, is being published by Grove Press this month.
In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Ryan reads 23 poems, all but one of which are included in her forthcoming Selected Poems. Beginning with the unpublished "A Cat," Ryan goes on to read "Her Politeness," and several poems from the 1994 Copper Beech Press collection Flamingo Watching, including the title poem, "This Life," "Apology," "Vacation," "A Certain Kind of Eden," "No Rest for the Idle," "The Narrow Path," "Spring," "Impersonal," "The Working Kabbalist," "The Test We Set Ourself," "The Hinge of Spring," "Deer," "Poetry Is a Kind of Money," "Masterworks of Ming," and "The Great-Taloned Osprey Nests in Scotland." Ryan concludes the reading with the newer poems "Bait Goat," "Dogleg," "Easter Island," and "Spiderweb."
From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(29:52) / 21.1 MB
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This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Kay Ryan. Used with generous permission from Kay Ryan.
The journal of the Key West Literary Seminar features recordings from our
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dispatches from Key West's literary past and present. It is created by Arlo
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Each January, we explore a different literary theme through lectures, panel presentations, readings, informal gatherings, and discussions. In January 2011, we explore food in literature with our 29th annual Seminar, THE HUNGRY MUSE.
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