Resistance to the Unreal: Michael Ryan's New and Selected Poems

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2005 by Rivard, David

THE IDEA OF "THE REAL" HAS ALWAYS HAD an allure for Americans. "Get real," we sayand it makes a sound that is ours and ours alone, a kind of epistemological undertone that hums absentmindedly beneath our belief in a national destiny. But lately "the real" has tended to sound like nothing so much as a marketing ploy. It tells us over and over again that entertainment is our greatest invention, and that reality is something that can be manipulated or dreamed into existence. And from the President with his Doctrine of Preemptive War to Paris Hilton and her turn as a pig farmer, one thing remains constant: illusion am us.

So it can sometimes seem as if the unreal permeates everything about us these days. Even the ground beneath our feet. Last fall, on the way to pick up my car at an auto body shop in industrial east Cambridge, I passed through a new condominium development on the site of what had once been a towing lot: two-story townhouses designed in what can only be described as a post-modern New England saltbox style. Where a network of pathways met and opened out into a public courtyard, an ornate plate about eighteen inches in diameter had been cemented into the brickwork. The plate had been salvaged from New Orleans, where in some better life it had been a cover for a city water meter. Under the words Sewerage e[ Water Board was a raised crescent moon, with thin cast-iron rays shooting out from the moon's center toward a constellation of rusted stars. Somehow the plate had found its way north to this little cedar-shingled village inhabited by biochemists, brokers and patent lawyers, the only people who could possibly afford to live in such a place. Someone-a landscape designer or architect-had probably thought of it as a bit of decorative authenticity. Or maybe it was just supposed to add a little charm. But there was an air of oblivion about the whole thing.

This is the atmosphere in which Michael Ryan's New and Selected Poems has landed. Resistance to the unreal, and attention to the difficult facts, are its fierce strengths. The book has been shaped consciously to illustrate the growth of one man's ability to respond to life-his own and that of otherswith adult compassion and moral intelligence. In it, the desire to be whole and true is balanced against the most scrupulous means of a witnessing conscience. It isn't an easy book; nor is Ryan a poet at ease either with himself or with life. "One might have thought of sight," says Wallace Stevens, "but who could think/of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?" Well, Ryan for one. He seems more than capable of such imagining of evil and loss. On the other hand, those scattered consolations of ordinary life arrived at in the book are actual and true, not the product of the poetic equivalent of spending the afternoon at a health spa.

Ryan's thirty-plus years of work are one answer to the question of what to write in a time bounded, at one extreme, by the fragmented silliness and earnest indefmiteness of so much post-modernism, and, at the other, by the middlebrow, consumer-friendly reportage that passes for "real life" in American poetry these days. He seems to have said, simply, "no thanks." Writing in his essay "Poetry and the Audience" fifteen years ago, he argued emphatically against both of the prevailing period styles: "the pressure for a poetic style that values ingenuity over profundity, nicety of expression over passion, restraint over candor, and complicationeven opacity-over simplicity." The New and Selected Poems is proof of just how far you might have to go once you've said "no thanks."

Dickinson has been a presiding deity for Ryan, and it's Dickinson's influence, her ethical forcefield translated into formal structure and inhabited perception, that we can feel behind the most recent work in Ryan's book. Because of character or genius or religious background, it may have been "natural" for Dickinson to turn toward the affections and sufferings of other human beings. This has not been the case with Ryan. In that sense, the New and Selected Poems is a record of a spiritual struggle. It's a struggle that probably will be more recognizable and accessible, for most people, than Dickinson's is-her "centeredness" (more Buddhist, it seems at times, than the Buddha's) being preternatural even when she is at her most anguished or awestruck, her images moving at their fastest and most disquieting speeds. Ryan, on the other hand, has been like a prisoner sawing slowly and persistently at the bars of the jailhouse window. "Dogged" is the word tattooed on his bicep:

REMINDER

Torment by appetite

is itself an appetite

dulled by inarticulate,

dogged, daily

loving-others-to-death

as Chekhov put it, "compassion

down to your fingertips"

looking on them as into the sun

not in the least for their own sake

but slowly for your own

because it causes

the blinded soul to bloom

like deliciousness in dirt,

like beauty from hurt,

their light-their light

pulls so purely. Let it.

This poem, the last in the book, summarizes the struggle in which Ryan's speaker so often finds himself, the testing of his ability to enter into and empathize with human suffering. It's also a kind of ars poetica, in that its complex honesty about the self-its recognition of a human hunger to remain in a state of constant wishfulness, for example, as well as its understanding that an unselfish-seeming compassion may ultimately be more about the self than the other-is distilled by a pressurized syntax and contained by quatrains that feel hammered into place, so that it becomes a model for language as thought caught in the act of speaking. It's typical of Ryan's work in that the poem's formal elegance feels unfussy, even while being demanding (it also clearly aligns Ryan more with poets like Frost, Larkin, and Hardy than with, say, Merrill and Auden). It's atypical, though, of Ryan's recent work as a whole. Since his third book, God Hunger, his impulse to generalize has been subordinated to strategies focused on the mechanisms of narrative.