The Imaginative Nature of Kay Ryan’s Poetic Bestiary

When she won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, Kay Ryan had already served from 2008 to 2010 as the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate and had worked for over thirty years teaching basic writing courses at a community college in California. One of her hallmarks is a candid refusal to take herself too seriously. “I’m surprised that my work has gotten as far as it has,” she told an interviewer in the Paris Review: “I had a very long apprenticeship” (55).

Scattered throughout Ryan’s collections of poems appear forty or more lyrics about animals, although they are rarely of a scientific or biological dimension. With titles like “Turtle,” “Deer,” “Osprey,” “Snake Charm,” “How Birds Sing,” “A Cat/A Future,” and “The Excluded Animals,” and with the bulk of them appearing in Flamingo Watching, they constitute a kind of imaginative bestiary, both whimsical and wise and often with a religious sensibility. Overall, one might think of them as falling into a few, although sometimes overlapping, categories: those reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s awe of “dappled things” (90); others that are playful and sly, telling us Dickinson’s “slant truths” (494) and making us laugh if we are careful readers; and a final group beginning with a seemingly simple observation about an animal but ending in a philosophical statement. This paper examines poems from each of these three groups, arguing that Ryan’s work deserves close and reflective reading lest we miss the rich, imaginative nature of this maverick poet of brief but highly individualized poems that both assert and subvert the bestiary form and refuse to be orthodox in style or thought.

As Dana Gioia and others have pointed out, Ryan’s poems differ remarkably from those of her postmodern peers. Largely self-taught (she never took a course in creative writing), she writes short poems, few longer than twenty lines and many much shorter, with individual lines consisting often of no more than three words in a kind of syncopated free verse. Her poems are lyrical, set up to solve problems or to consider ideas. They often seem to follow Frost’s famous dictate to begin in delight and end in wisdom. Both simple and complex, they are written in a language inventive (she sometimes makes up words) and exact. With compressed syntax and hidden or internal rhymes and much assonance, the poems turn back on themselves with a rapidity of image and sound. They are intricate and fast and demand rereading to savor their wordplay, quirkiness, and wit. At poetic readings, Ryan typically reads each poem twice or even three times to allow for moments of silence (Enszer 1).

As a literary genre, the bestiary is, of course, an ancient form, the medieval bestiary having roots in a third century A.D. text titled Physiologus or The Naturalist. As a compendium of beasts, the medieval bestiary offered a natural history of animals usually accompanied by a moral lesson, which in part addressed the animal’s characteristics in light of Christian theology (Harmon 52–53). The medieval bestiary thus functioned as both a secular encyclopedia and a homiletic device (Cronin 194). Ryan’s bestiary poems serve less as zoological representations than, Paul Lake explains, as “mysterious emblems bearing a wealth of hidden meanings” (3). Of note, included in Ryan’s 1996 collection Elephant Rocks appears her own whimsically titled poem “Bestiary,” a wittingly sardonic lyric that mocks the savage within that wins at all costs. These “savage,” “clever,” “spectacularly pincered” and “archest of the arch deceivers” demand and get the prize. Her bestiary, however, is actually a “best-iary,” a coinage that allows her to differentiate “best” from “good.” “Good” is a “different creature altogether,” she claims, “and treated of in the goodiary— / a text alas lost now for centuries” (13–15). Ryan thus mocks the human beast, not the animal, and teases the reader’s expectations.

Among Ryan’s animal poems that fall into the category I have designated as one of “awe” appears “Snake Charm,” published in her 1994 collection...