Review: Erratic Facts

Erratic Facts by Kay Ryan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I stumbled across this collection at the MLA, and I picked it up because the first several poems simply grabbed me. I’ve been challenging myself to read more collections of poetry, so that’s something I sometimes do: pick up a volume and see if it talks to me. As a result, I don’t read any poetry that I don’t already like a lot. There’s so much of it in the world that it seems silly to spend time on something that doesn’t talk to you.

I’d never heard of Kay Ryan, but, as it turns out, I’m hardly making some deep discovery. She’s won a Pulitzer and been the U.S. Poet Laureate, so there’s really nowhere up to go from there. That’s the nature of 21st Century American poetry, I guess – even the stars are obscure. (That makes the broad acknowledgement of Mary Oliver’s death so startling; most of us simply don’t know our poets.)

Ryan’s poems are all short. She works with a line-length well less than a breath, and her work has a zen koan quality to it. She boils her insights down to such an essence that we’ve swallowed them whole before we quite realize it. There’s a meditative quality in the work, but there’s also a lot of humor. She’s taking her ideas and her poetry seriously, but she doesn’t seem to be taking the idea of poetry too seriously.

Most of my favorites are the very first ones. Consider, for instance, “New Rooms”

The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms—just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren’t where
the windows went.

I love the brevity of this one, but I love as well the way it lingers. I think that feeling, the sense that, after a major change in my life or world, I want to get back to a familiar rhythm. Instead, as she says, “the new holes aren’t where the windows went.” That tight, slanted-truth seems almost worthy of Emily Dickinson, a truth that we recognize as truth only after she says it.

Another that prompted me to pick this up is “On The Nature of Understanding”

Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it half way.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it’s
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.

That too seems to capture a truth I’d almost already known. I have that sense of getting locked within myself in the midst of a new project, a new attempt at understanding. Just because I set myself the task of coming to understand a thing, it doesn’t mean that I will succeed. Ryan reminds me that understanding has to be a conversation, a dialogue, and one of the great potential errors is to assume that which the other is saying.

I can’t help having read this in the context of another book I picked up at the MLA, Lee McIntyre’s Post Truth, a study of the way we have reached a point of such contested sense about what it means for something to be “true” in Trump’s America. I see here a playful response to that uncertainty. Read within the moment, Ryan is showing how the mind pushes toward knowledge and then pulls away nearly as fast. The title poem isn’t one of my particular favorites, but its title suggests just that point: we necessarily perceive the world with expectations, but those expectations – in their erratic application to the world as it is – often lead us into error.

She gets at that same sound-of-one-hand-clapping insight with an excerpt from “Trench Like That.”

The question
is does
the sea go
exactly back
after a ship
passes. Is
a trench like
that an event
or not…

That image simply works for me. I’ve often wondered at the strangeness of doing a thing that leaves no trace (something I did just yesterday when an hour of shoveling snow seemed to matter not at all to the additional half inch that had fallen behind me as I worked). I feel Ryan posing a question, and I feel compelled to answer it even as I know I can’t.

Other favorites include “Token Loss,” “All Your Horses,” and “Why Explain the Precise By Way of the Less Precise.”

I’m going to stick this one on the shelf and, given the bite-sized conundrums it offers so widely, I expect I’ll pull it down again every so often.


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