Kay Ryan:
But here’s the thing: the thing that’s exactly right may be a tiny part of a great deal that is much less exact, not very right at all and certainly not that right. … The job of almost all the words is to suspend the essential words, which cannot exist without some context.
This is ennobling all the way around. It imparts value to all the whistling needed to suspend those two transcendent notes that open the dark.
Some really impressing views watching a storm move through the Canyon today.
This first one was on Maricopa Point. We decided to step away when we realized that everyone’s loose hair strands were standing straight up and that that repeated feeling of a spider web on your arm or face was actually the static charge in the air.
Shocking experience all around 🤓
Let’s go north, and leave this Phoenix heat behind
The Toasted Owl in Flagstaff • A side-menu worthy of Jack’s refined tastes
The sign of a good “a.m. eatery”
Apostrophe: the addressing of a usually absent person or a usually personified thing rhetorically
Kay Ryan, for context:
“The handkerchiefs almost frighten us by their perfection.” Who but Marianne Moore could possibly have written this? Her Selected Letters offers up a ridiculous sublimity of letter-writing in which nothing, not the least gift of handkerchiefs, escapes meticulous apostrophe.
Currently Reading: Synthesizing Gravity by Kay Ryan 📚
I have loved a few of Kay Ryan’s poems for a time, but only recently have I read any of her poetry in bulk. (An awful word for poetry collections, I admit, but I’m not implying any sort of speed in reading them.) Then I found this collection of her essays and — between the poems and the prose, she has quickly become one of my favorite writers on the planet.
Writing about Marianne Moore’s poetry, Ryan remarks, “She commonly looks at something quite remote and rustic … and it explodes in a variety of alarming directions.”
“Yet in another way,” she says, “observation is just the detonator for an explosion of private associations, glittering in their rhetorical arcs, and upon there descent into the reader’s brainpan randomly meaningful and meaningless.”
I love reading, love all the glittering, meaningful and meaningless rehetorical arcs.