Alone in a Good Way

I keep meaning to post this bit of business from Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate and very smart lady. I bought an anthology called Poem in Your Pocket, put out by Academy of American Poets, edited by Elaine Beakley, with an introduction by Kay Ryan. The book's concept is sort of cool: the pages are held together at the top like a notepad so you can tear the poems out easily and carry them around with you. In, like, your pocket. Get it?!

Okay, anyway, maybe it's a touch heavy-handed or cute, but I dig it. And the truth is, although there are some good poems here, I bought the book because of Ryan's short, delicious intro, which says this astonishing thing. I read it in the bookstore, and stood at the table holding the book, jaw dropped and the room ever-so-slightly buzzing and spinning with the truth of it:

"On some level poems can, of course, do good works and bind us together. Everybody will tell you that, but I'm never very interested. I'm convinced, rather, that poems bind us apart. They disconnect us from that pestering illusion that we are almost connecting to the world.

Oh, what can that mean? Well, we are alone, and poems make us feel more alone. But wait, I don't mean "alone" in the bad way, what we feel when we know that spending all the money in the world isn't going to keep the shimmer on life; I mean "alone" in the good way.

Alone in the sense of experiencing inside yourself a cascading series of exquisite discriminations and connections which leave you in the fullest possible possession of your self while simultaneously providing the most intimate escape from self, as though the twisted double helixes of your secret code got some blessed breathing room from each other for a minute.

And strangely enough, it is during the private murmured conversation between the poem and the reader, both agreeing that the world cannot be known or contacted, that it is."

Truly.