chris burke

Lessons from nature

—for Kay Ryan


Once in bed

all week I drew

the aerobatic

hoopla of a fly

buzzing for the holy

slender egress

of a window

on a stolen legal

pad and called it

'Sorry, no escape.'

Quite. Perhaps

that flies in art

circles or the "We

found his journals"

nutso world

but I was circling

nowhere fast

and the fly had merely

drawn that

conclusion first.

_____


Statement of Homage


I reckon many of my friends might be amazed to discover my penchant for Kay Ryan. And that's entirely my fault. She's not among the influences that come to mind if ever I get asked – she's too unique to even dare approach – and so my admiration has developed into a sort of clandestine relationship. I wouldn't be surprised if her work is divisive, but the imagined detractors in my head (too neat, too glib, too detached, too gnomic) are seriously missing out. I can read a 30-word poem of hers and want to set fire to a 30-line poem of mine. I go to her, and keep going back, for pure poetry: the condensed idea that knocks you over with its crisp Enlightenment reason and wild Romantic weirdness. Her brain knows no limits and her poems are all about limits. I'm constantly amazed by what she gets away with, ending a line with "the" or "a", until I realise the rhythm of the poem demands it, and that masters of the craft rewrite any perceived rules. She reminds me to be brash. I like to be reminded to be brash, and I adore how she can sucker you in with a repetitive rhyme, then switch the rhyme at the very end like a heavyweight jab. I love the fact that she rhymes at all, and the feeling of being thrown around by the atonal music of her rhythms in pieces packed with energy. Her poems are cut gems – compact, shimmering and, I fully expect, timeless.


Kay Ryan


Kay Ryan is among the USA's most venerated living poetic voices, a Poet Laureate of her native country between 2008 and 2010, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. In a published career that began with her first book Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends in 1983, Ryan has released eight poetry collections and won multiple awards. For many years as a teacher at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California, Ryan has succeeded in developing an immediately recognisable style, her short poems and thin lines replete with wit, playfulness, and philosophy – not to mention what she has labelled "recombinant rhyme", a precise and often surprising sprinkling of rhymed words to, in her description, "get the poem to go a little bit luminescent".

_____

Chris Burke is an English-Irish writer and journalist whose debut collection of poetry, The Noise of Everything at Once, was published by Happy House Books in 2017. He has won second prize in the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition and been longlisted multiple times in the UK National Poetry Competition, while his works have appeared in magazines including Southword, Antiphon, Prole, and the French Literary Review.