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Best of the National Book Festival: Kay Ryan, 2008

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Each weekday, the National Book Festival blog is featuring a video presentation from among the thousands of authors who have appeared at the National Book Festival and as part of the new year-long series, National Book Festival Presents. Today, in honor of National Poetry Month, we’re spotlighting Poet Laureate Kay Ryan at the 2008 National Book Festival. Please enjoy, and make sure to keep up with the whole blog series and explore the full National Book Festival video collection!

Kay Ryan, 16th U. S. Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010, was still new to her position when she participated in the 2008 National Book Festival on the Poetry & Prose stage.

The program opens with a welcome by then Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, followed by remarks from then National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia (at 4:15). Kay Ryan is from the West and grew up in the Mojave Desert area. The sparseness of that terrain is reflected in the deceptive sparseness of her poetry: She packs enormous depth and meaning into very few words.

Listeners will be captivated by Ryan’s poems, and by her equally spare and wry sense of humor, as exhibited in her interview (at 37:15) with Gioia. “I feel like I’ve been rewarded for a life of privacy,” Ryan says, “living in my pajamas. … Somebody asked me about my outreach. … I have spent my whole life thinking about in-reach.”

Kay Ryan’s reading begins at 6:55; timestamps for individual poems are below:

  • “Emptiness” (7:47)
  • “Vacation” (8:56)
  • “When Fishing Fails” (10:53)
  • “Force” (12:11)
  • “Turtle” (13:19)
  • “Dew” (14:55)
  • “Bestiary” (16:08)
  • “New Clothes” (17:30)
  • “A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water” (18:46)
  • “Composition” (20:35)
  • “Patience” (22:39)
  • “The Fabric of Life” (24:25)
  • “Matrigupta” (25:41)
  • “Among English Verbs” (27:22)
  • “Why We Must Struggle” (28:58)
  • “Weak Forces” (30:17)
  • “Shipwreck” (31:44)
  • “Dogleg” (33:14)
  • “Train-Track Figure” (34:22)
  • “Odd Blocks” (35:18)