Kay Ryan, "Album"

Hi all --

When I first started teaching at my present school, 3 years ago, I was disappointed I only had a student or two to congratulate at graduation. This was no fault of anyone. I had just started and my classes are core classes, usually taken early in a student's course plan. So the chances I could flash a big smile and scream "LET'S GO!" when they took the stage and then meet their family and friends were incredibly slim.

Honestly, I was shocked this year to see a good number of those I had taught graduate. I had many of them for only one 8 week course and was stunned how many remembered me. They're all amazing; a few stories will suffice. One wants to be a journalist; her writing in my class was exceptional and she showed incredible sensitivity to how power worked. Another took inspiration from my class to challenge themselves with academic books. They're not just reading them, but making notes and tracking how their thinking changes. Still another has credible, awesome plans for what to do at the school they are transferring to. I have no doubt they will transform their next institution for the better, being nothing less than a living legend.

I'm super proud but there is so much to do. I am fortunate that algorithms work in my favor: Reels has been flooding me with content from museums and I have seen a lot more art in the last few weeks than I have in a while. It's really beautiful and I love how I have been given a private little collection. Inspired by that, I'm planning on writing on Heidegger and van Gogh's "Shoes" to follow up my presentation/paper on whether a thoughtful nationalism is possible. How exactly should we approach the arts, especially when it is possible to romanticize the wrong elements? Plenty of people dehumanize others in the name of images they think they want. All the same, we're not getting past where we are now without a massive investment in our imaginations.

Kay Ryan, "Album"

Kay Ryan can open a poem with a peculiar virtuosity. She'll begin with a thesis, placing herself in the combined role of poet, metaphysician, and natural philosopher, not unlike the Presocratics. At stake is how we see reality, if not reality itself. Consider “Lime Light”—One can’t work by lime light, or “Sharks’ Teeth”—Everything contains some silence. When I’ve read the first few lines of these poems, I’ve treated what comes afterward as a demonstration or dissertation, a proof of her definitive statement. "Album" puts our old family photos next to death and life themselves:

Death has a life of its own.

See how its album has grown.

Sometimes even I forget that a thesis, a contention about what is, is set forth to give us pause:

Album (from Poetry)
Kay Ryan

Death has a life
of  its own. See
how its album
has grown in
a year and how
the sharp blot of it
has softened
till those could
almost be shadows
behind the
cherry blossoms
in this shot.
In fact you
couldn’t prove
they’re not.

I think about one photograph in particular quite a lot. It is of a recent mother wearing a winter coat, standing in a church parking lot on a gray day. From her arms, a plastic grocery bag filled with stuff dangles as she holds a baby who is distracted by something to the side, paying attention to anything but the photographer or his mother. The mother smiles brightly, like nothing could destroy this moment. Like everything is as it should be.

Death has a life of its own and an album that grows. It builds this album from my memories. In a way, it feels like it steals life, though we are told it has a life “of its own.”

I believe it works in parallel with me far too closely. As I collect memories, I bear witness to how its album has grown in a year. I see more clearly what can be lost, what is lost, as I gain.

And then, in the images that are my memories, the snapshots already a degree removed from moments lived, a curiosity. How the sharp blot of it has softened till those could almost be shadows behind the cherry blossoms in this shot. Death has a “sharp blot." What a strange phrase! At once, “sharp”—something striking, something piercing, like accidentally coming across an item beloved by someone departed. A detail one can’t forget, like cherry blossoms. And also, at once, a "blot," more spill than detail, both ambiguous and overwhelming.

This “sharp blot” softens. I’m looking at the photograph more closely; my feelings aren’t dying but rather changing. I’m imagining again. What is in the dangling plastic bag? Who was the photographer? Did we get rain that day? There's a softness to these questions not unlike seeing what could almost be shadows behind the cherry blossoms in this shot. The shadows tell us a light is cast; nothing, not even a fading photo, is merely an image in two-dimensions. Death has a life of its own—something within death works very much like life.

In fact you couldn’t prove they’re not. Not that the mind plays tricks on us, such that we cannot tell what is waking or sleeping, life or death. But that memory consists in far more than a search for clarity: the “sharp blot” pulls toward and pushes us away from details, both at once. Maybe it was a shadow that I hadn’t seen before. More than likely, what was in the plastic bag has been long forgotten. The funny thing is an after-life is possible in simply looking through an album and trying to remember. I’m not sure if there were cherry blossoms in the church parking lot, but I remember them all over my hometown, especially along long walks I used to take to the library.