Abram: Hello, I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: And today we are discussing a poem called Crib by Kay Ryan. Abram, would you read this poem, please? Abram: [To read the poem, visit this website] Joanne: Ooh, that's such a good poem. I love the way you read it. Oh, that's great. Abram: So Joanne, tell me, who is Kay Ryan anyway? Joanne: Oh, she is one of my all time favorites. And I'm not alone. Everybody loves her work. She's the author so many collections of poetry, and she's won many prizes and awards, and maybe most importantly for our purposes, she was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2008 to 2010, and it might just be worth mentioning what the Poet Laureate is, and I only say that because sometimes I ask my students if they know, and quite often they don't, so the Library of Congress anoints a poet laureate and we call them poet laureates because it kind of harkens back to the military victors of ancient Greece and Rome and the decorated poets of ancient Greece and Rome that would be adorned with these wreaths of laurel leaves as crowns on their heads to indicate their military or poetic virtuosity. So I really love that phrase, poet laureate. And it's an honorary position, and it's meant to give the poet laureate sort of a public poet position, and it allows them to perhaps, if they're called upon, they can write a poem for a public occasion or start a national poetry initiative of some sort. So in brief, she was a poet laureate of the United States. And one of the things I love a lot of things about Kay Ryan, one of the things I love most about her is that she was writing for a long time before she became like a poet with a capital P. And she had this very steady output for decades and then finally became a really celebrated, honored poet. And I admire her work so much. Why do you love her? Abram: I'm a big fan of Kay Ryan, as so many people are, and one of the things I love about Kay Ryan's work is just her sheer pleasure in language. You know, my wife is a linguist, and I just think that Kay Ryan would be a delight to her, because every poem is thinking about language itself, and then playing with the sounds of language, the music of language. One of the things that Kay Ryan is particularly noted for is the kind of music that is almost Kay Ryan-esque. It's just her own way of making music out of language. She has these very short, tight poems. And in those poems, there's seldom a sense of end rhyme, but there are rhymes scattered throughout the poem. And she calls this recombinant. She says she likes stashing rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middle. There's a playfulness. She just sort of has fun with language in a way that makes poetry itself really enjoyable. Joanne: Yes, and at the same time, many of her poems are deadly serious too, and I love that juxtaposition. So even if, as you just read this poem, I felt myself smiling at the ends of a couple of the sentences, which felt very funny to me. And we can talk about those in a second, but there's often something in the poem that's troubling the poetic speaker. She also had this to say about her work. She says that her poems do not start with imagery or sound but rather they develop the way an oyster does with an aggravation. Abram: Yeah, I think one of the things that aggravates her in this poem is simply the many different meanings of crib crib on the one Hand means, you know this thing that we put babies in. And yet it has this ancient meaning of to steal. So how does a word mean both to steal or to thieve or to take something that is not your own and a soft basket for a baby? How can it be one and the same thing? There's kind of aggravation there. There's a kind of question. There's a wonder there. And so she goes back to the sources of this word and she traces it out. And then of course she moves. In a way that seems natural by the time you come to the end of it, but it's still surprising when you get there. From the etymology of crib about a woven basket used to steal things, even liquor to, you know, basically the Christmas story, right? She gets from one end to the other by working out the kind of troubling relation of the meanings of this word itself. Joanne: Yeah, that's really great. So, maybe we'll just jump into it, right? Let's look at that first sentence, which does so many of the wonderful things we've already talked about. Crib. “From the Greek for / woven or plated, / which quickly translated / to basket.” I like that. So she's just, it's just very simple, right? But she's setting up some of those recombinant rhymes that you mentioned earlier, aligning “plated” with “translated”. But then the sounds pick up in the next sentence, “Whence the verb / crib, which meant to ‘filch’ / under cover of wicker, / anything-some liquor, / a cutlet.” I smiled when you read that the first time, a cutlet. Abram: Yeah. And just so listeners can, can sort of see what she's doing within the lines themselves, all of these words are sort of hidden and they're all sort of resonating with one another. So you have quickly, crib, wicker, liquor, you have basket with cutlet, basket ends one sentence, cutlet ends another sentence. You have filch, which picks up that That short sound you have plated with translated. And this is all just in a few lines and what I love about Kay Ryan. And it's often the case in very simple language, very accessible language, very simple sentences to read. And yet these sorts of resonances are not exactly what you expect. This sort of music is what makes it so poetic. Joanne: You know, also, not only is she using rhyme in these really creative ways, sometimes in the middle of her very short lines. Sometimes at the ends, but the rhythms are very humorous as well. In the olden days, do literary critics still do this? If you have a stressed beat followed by an unstressed beat at the end of a poetic line, like Do we still, do people still call that a feminine rhyme? Abram: I think that's still a technical term. Joanne: Oh God, that has to be revised. That's absurd because of course it's totally misogynistic. It's like, well, it's a weak ending to a line, so we'll call it feminine. Oh, so offensive. But anyway, look how many times she does that at the ends of her lines throughout the poem. I didn't really realize this until I started to kind of annotate the poem. Plated, translated, wicker, liquor, cutlet, pleasure, answers, shimmer, noticed, baby, again and again, she understands that deploying that stressed/unstressed sound at the ends of lines is a little bit lighter, a little bit more comic than landing on a hard syllable. So she's doing a lot of things with sound that are very, very interesting. Abram: The alternative term for a rhyme is a masculine rhyme, which is supposedly stronger and so on and so forth. But what's interesting is that she does come to a kind of almost masculine rhyme to end the poem. And so you do get the sense of closure here at the end where crib and did end up the sort of finale of the poem. So she says, “Note, for instance, in our / annual rehearsals of innocence, / the substitution of manger for crib- / as if we ever deserve that baby, / or thought we did”. Yeah. The did sort of really powerfully closes it off. The sound of the language is something she's just constantly playing with. Joanne: Yes. And also she's very interested in making important points about human nature, just the way we behave. For we want to make off with things that are not our own. There is a pleasure theft brings. A vitality. Cribbed objects or answers keep their guilty shimmer forever. Have you noticed? Abram: She's also said that she is not afraid of didacticism, that is a kind of teaching, but it's a kind of didacticism with a joke. She basically wants you to say, she wants to say, “I don't take myself too seriously, but these are some insights that I've come to”. Joanne: Yeah, I like that. that. You know, I once heard her give a poetry reading in Chicago, and this is when she was the poet laureate. I have never seen someone have so much fun and take so much delight in reading her work. So her poems are very, very short. It takes less than a minute to read most of them. And you know what she would do? She, for each of the poems that she read. She'd read the poem once, and then she'd kind of smile or laugh a little. And then she said, you know what, I'm going to read that again. And then she'd read it a second time. And it was just great. I love that she did that because, you know, the word pleasure is in this poem and we've used that word more than once. I could tell she was just really having a good time. Even if, as we say, these are poems that address the big, sometimes difficult topics, there's a joy and an ebullience, a kind of bounciness to them, no? Abram: What I find so amazing about what she does, though, is that even though she does not write confessional poetry on purpose, she still gives you a sense of intimacy with her. She still, in a certain sense, makes it feel as though you're sitting alone with her discussing very serious things in a witty and fun sort of way. So at one point she said, “I like to write personal poems in such a way that no one has to know that”. Joanne: How interesting that she doesn't say, for I want to make off with things that are not my own. She uses the collective we, and she does this in a lot of her poems. If you read her poems across time, she resists that. The urge to use the first person perspective. And she said that she deliberately resists the use of the eye. You know, she uses this kind of cool tone in order to address hot things, like really difficult, hot things. And that quite often the eye feels a little too intense, a little too hot for the emotions she wants to explore. And so that, that distance of the we, or the distance that she's able to use broader generalizations can kind of help her across a lot of different kinds of terrain. Abram: And just to get into the big topics of this poem, we're talking about guilt. We're talking about innocence. She is exploring the Christmas story in this poem, the idea that somebody else's innocence might be made our own. She says, when we talk about a manger we cover up the fact that we are in effect stealing this child, at least in Christian traditions, this God child, right? We're stealing this child from God for our own needs as if we ever deserved that baby “or thought we did”. And so she is trying to acknowledge that. There is a kind of pleasure that comes from stealing things, you know, this idea, we have this phrase, right? A guilty pleasure. What is a guilty pleasure? How long does that pleasure last? Does it require a rehearsal of innocence? And all of that is built into a poem that, you know, begins with the etymology of the word crib. You just wouldn't see it coming. Joanne: Okay, can, can I just ask a question? What are you talking about? Us stealing baby Jesus? What are you referring to? This is another one of those examples where, boy, am I glad that there's someone who knows something about religion in the room. Did we steal little baby Jesus? Abram: I think that she's seen in the Christmas story as this kind of reminder of innocence, that this innocent child came into the world and that we sort of partake in it and then take ownership of it. And I think for her, at least in the, as I read this poem, it's a kind of theft of innocence to be doing that rehearsal. We cover up the fact that we are not innocent and that we are taking it and the very act of taking it is what requires the rehearsal or the return to the recovery of that innocence in the first place. Joanne: And I also love the word rehearsals. That seems like one of the most important words in the poem. “Note, for instance, in our / annual rehearsals of innocence, / the substitution of manger for crib- / as if we ever deserve that baby, / or thought we did”. I like rehearsals because it suggests performance. It suggests we are not innocent, but once a year we like to rehearse that we are. Abram: You know, there's so much in this poem. What finally makes the poem work for me is not just this grand insight that comes at you out of nowhere at the end, but also this sense that the music and playfulness of it is still so short. So almost all of her poems are this short. They're almost all built like little witticisms. Like playful, musical, brief witticisms built out of an aggravation, coming to a conclusion and leaving you with a kind of sting. And I love that about her poems, but also because they're built in that kind of way, they keep unpacking. I mean, just the way that we've talked, you know, for however many minutes about this very brief poem. And she has this great quote, which I think applies to so much of poetry, which I just absolutely love. And it gets at both the playfulness and the seriousness of her, her sort of demeanor. So an interviewer once asked her, why did you say that poems should act like an empty suitcase? And she said, “Oh, I meant a clown suitcase. The clown flips open the suitcase and pulls out a ton of stuff. A poem is an empty suitcase that you can never quit.” Empty. I just love that image of poetry. Joanne: Yeah. Yeah. It's great. It's both comic and absurd and plentiful and yeah, really, really interesting. Abram: So with all that said, would you be willing to read this poem for us again? Joanne: Yes, happily. [Poem]. Abram: That's a great reading. Thank you so much. Joanne: Yeah, what a lovely poem. Abram: To learn more about Kay Ryan, please visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm. Joanne: And you can subscribe to Poetry For All wherever you get your podcasts. And please remember to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Abram: Thanks for listening.