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

Another word for this is sincerity, and from first page to last the writing m secret Life is suffused with it. This sincerity is a compound of scrupulous self-purging and objectifying compassionwithout the compassion (for his molester, for those Ryan himself had hurt with his obsessive sexual hunting, for himself as the boy and man he had been), there would likely be an atmosphere of aggrieved judgment and sensationalism; without the scrupulosity, there might be an avoiding of the most painful facts and possibly even a sort of "selfhero worship" in which the story would present itself as the triumph of a resurrected soul.

The voice narrating this life is dispassionate. But the calm candor with which it describes even the most brutal moments of the molestation isn't so much about spiritual detachment or stoicism as it is about a faith in words to tell the truth. As in the following passage-which deals with one of the women involved with Ryan in the months shortly before his life blew up in the early 80's-the writing is clean, particularized, and probing. It's especially interesting to see how the flow of sentences adds to the evolving complexity of each paragraph. Each sentence keeps shifting not only our attention, but the voice's sense of its own "posture."

This made long-term relationships impossible, to say the least, and monogamy impossible. I dealt with the former by dealing with it up front (if the subject arose), and dealt with the latter through power. I liked students because I had power over them. Although I was teaching only two courses, Marcia was getting three grades from me, the third being her senior thesis on John Donne, which I was directing. I slept with other women that semester, but she was the only student. One of her jokes was that she was the little Dutch girl with her finger in the dike, protecting all other Princeton coeds from the flood-a joke I enjoyed because it implied I was an inexorable sexual force. Dark. Dangerous. Devastating. The only way I could stay inside sex with her was for her to participate in this myth by surrendering completely to the Sex King. Such self-ironic honorifics were designed to defuse this dynamic between us, but they were serious jokes. I was certainly a magnet for some women, as some women were for me-suicidal women for whom sex was both validation and self-annihilation, an intense temporary escape from the pain of being themselves (as it was for me). Many of them had also been sexually molested, some of them by their fathers. I could pick them out the minute I walked into a room. Their hunger is what made them sexy to me and, no doubt, vice-versa. We always at least half-hated each other, the half that was a mirror.

Marcia was such a knockout I wanted to squire her about to show her off, but she would have none of that. She insisted our relationship be secret. She made me pick her up in alleys downtown. When her friends asked her how she had spent the weekend, she made up a story. Some of the undergraduate boys complained to me that they couldn't get to first base with her and speculated that she must be dating some honcho lawyer or actor in New York. How I loved smiling to myself then. Maybe some similar part of her enjoyed having the secret, too, but as the semester went along, it got harder for her. She was my student during the week and my lover on weekends. She said she felt invaded. She said she didn't know where I ended and she began.