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INTERVIEWER
Many critics compare you to Dickinson. Do you think you’re like Dickinson?
RYAN
That question is like asking, Do you think you’re much like God? That’s not interesting to me. It might be interesting for others, but I feel like it makes me do the work that other people ought to do. Besides, how would you like to be compared to God?
INTERVIEWER
When you rode your bicycle across the country you discovered you were meant to become a writer, but what are the practical ways you taught yourself to write?
RYAN
I’d kept a journal of that trip and decided that I would get up every day and transcribe that journal, augment it and fix it up. What that gave me was the habit.
But once that was done I didn’t know what I was going to do. I’d bought a tarot deck—this was the seventies—a standard one with a little accompanying book that explained how to read the cards, lay them out, shuffle them—all those things. But I’m not a student and was totally impatient with learning anything about the cards. I thought they were just interesting to look at. But I did use the book’s shuffling method, which was very elaborate, and in the morning I’d turn one card over and whatever that card was I would write a poem about it. The card might be Love, or it might be Death. My game, or project, was to write as many poems as there were cards in the deck. But since I couldn’t control which cards came up, I’d write some over and over again and some I’d never see. That gave me range. I always understood that to write poetry was to be totally exposed. But in the seventies I only had models of ripping off your clothes, and I couldn’t do that. My brain could be naked, but I didn’t want to be naked. Nor was I interested in the heart, or love. The tarot helped me see that I could write about anything—even love if required—and retain the illusion of not being exposed. If one is writing well, one is totally exposed. But at the same time, one has to feel thoroughly masked or protected.
INTERVIEWER
And that was it? Your style was born?
RYAN
No, I was still extremely prosy. The problem for me was that I willed my poetry at first. I had too much control. But in time the benevolences of metaphor and rhyme sent me down their rabbit holes, in new directions, so that my will—my intention—was sent hither and yon. And in that mix of intention and diversion, I could get a tiny inkling of things far beyond me.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with what you’ve called recombinant rhyme?
RYAN
When I started writing nobody rhymed—it was in utter disrepute. Yet rhyme was a siren to me. I had this condition of things rhyming in my mind without my permission. Still I couldn’t take end-rhyme seriously, which meant I had to find other ways—I stashed my rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middles—the front of one word would rhyme with the back of another one, or one word might be identical to three words. In “Turtle,” for instance, I rhyme “afford” with “a four-oared,” referring to a four-oared helmet: “Who would be a turtle who could help it? / A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, / she can ill afford the chances she must take / in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.” The rhymes are just jumping all around in there, holding everything together.
What’s recombinant rhyme? It’s like how they add a snip of the jellyfish’s glow-in-the-dark gene to bunnies and make them glow green; by snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem I found I could get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever write in form?
RYAN
Never. I don’t have any gift for it. I find it kind of embarrassing. If Frost does it, if Larkin does it, I adore it and I fall before it. But for me, it would be like wearing the wrong clothes.
INTERVIEWER
Are you still generating poems all of the time?
RYAN
If I’m lucky, I probably write twelve keepers in a year.
INTERVIEWER
During the nine years between Strangely Marked Metal and Flamingo Watching, were you writing every day?
RYAN
No, not every day. I shingled the outside of the house. That took three years. All these shingles are by me.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that you take too long between collections?
RYAN
I think there’s too much poetry out there. I don’t need to add to the waste stream.
INTERVIEWER
Did you always believe in your work, even at an early stage?
RYAN
Especially at an early stage. I just didn’t know how badly I was doing. That was a blessing. I don’t know how I would have survived if I hadn’t thought that everybody was stupid not to think that it was as good as I thought it was. Still I had to defend it, because there is nothing legitimate about being a beginning writer. I had to treat it with respect and learn my craft.
INTERVIEWER
Did your opinion of your work change as you became more successful?
RYAN
The less acknowledgment I had from the world, the more forcefully I insisted that this was the best thing since the discovery of the woof and the warp. But as the world’s opinion of me has elevated, my own has lowered sensibly.
I’m surprised that my work has gotten as far as it has. I had a very long apprenticeship.
INTERVIEWER
How did you start to publish your work?
RYAN
Initially, I had no method for sending work out. It was completely chaotic and I was in despair. For years I had towers of work and absolutely no idea of what to do with it. Carol took me in hand and got me organized. She had me send out packets of five poems to ten or twenty places every few weeks. Then we had to endure ten years of agonizingly slow progress. It drove me insane to be as patient as I had to be. I didn’t have any choice. I wasn’t patient, but I couldn’t find any shortcuts. I didn’t know how to make things go faster.
Sending work out did change my work, though. When I knew that the poems were going to be read by a stranger, I cleaned them up. And when I got them back rejected, I could see them with a really cold eye.
INTERVIEWER
Did you crave success?
RYAN
Oh, desperately. It’s very un–Emily Dickinson of me, but I did. At one point, the New Yorker poetry editor, Alice Quinn, came to Berkeley to give a talk at some festival or conference, and I even bought a ticket to go because I thought, I’ve got to make some kind of connection. But I couldn’t bring myself to go. I’m too proud. I could only meet someone as an equal, or a near equal.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever think of giving up?
RYAN
I didn’t have anything to give up to. It seemed like I was going to be Henry Darger. The poems would have been stuck in my room. I’ve gotten a lot of my subject matter from failure. I began to think of myself as a terrific underdog. There’s a certain security and exhilaration in that.
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