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Strangely Marked Metal
Poetry. Available again, this is the second printing of Bay Area poet, Kay Ryan's 1985 debut. "Kay Ryan makes it all fresh again with her highly original vision, her elegant, quirky craft.... These poems look easy, but the deeper one delves, the more they astonish and nourish"--May Sarton.
- GenresPoetry
56 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1985
About the author
Kay Ryan
36 books169 followersBorn in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Ryan's tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges like the one in Marin County, California where she and her partner Carol Adair taught for over thirty years. In an interview with the Washington City Paper at the end of tenure, Ryan called herself a “whistle-blower” who “advocated for much underpraised and underfunded community colleges across the nation.”
Ryan’s surprising laureateship capped years of outsider-status in the poetry world. Her quizzical, philosophical, often mordant poetry is a product of years of thought. Ryan has said that her poems do not start with imagery or sound, but rather develop “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” Critic Meghan O’Rourke has written of her work: “Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them.” “Sharks’ Teeth” displays that meandering approach to her subject matter, which, Ryan says, “gives my poems a coolness. I can touch things that are very hot because I’ve given them some distance.”
Kay Ryan is the recipient of several major awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has received the Union League Poetry Prize and the Maurice English Poetry Award, as well as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Since 2006 she has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Ryan's tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges like the one in Marin County, California where she and her partner Carol Adair taught for over thirty years. In an interview with the Washington City Paper at the end of tenure, Ryan called herself a “whistle-blower” who “advocated for much underpraised and underfunded community colleges across the nation.”
Ryan’s surprising laureateship capped years of outsider-status in the poetry world. Her quizzical, philosophical, often mordant poetry is a product of years of thought. Ryan has said that her poems do not start with imagery or sound, but rather develop “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” Critic Meghan O’Rourke has written of her work: “Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them.” “Sharks’ Teeth” displays that meandering approach to her subject matter, which, Ryan says, “gives my poems a coolness. I can touch things that are very hot because I’ve given them some distance.”
Kay Ryan is the recipient of several major awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has received the Union League Poetry Prize and the Maurice English Poetry Award, as well as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Since 2006 she has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 6, 2007
Kay Ryan is my favorite American poet (sorry, Stephen Dunn!) because of the stark and yet playful beauty of her poems. I always think of them as being like linguistic jazz, with their odd internal rhyme schemes and syncopated rhythms. They're totally unique and often incredibly compelling, each one a gem.
February 8, 2026
Rhyming has a bad reputation as being a rapacious thing, forcing together the ends of sentences until they touch, bending even the entire syntax into saying what the author didn't mean to say, but only said because of their limited imagination. Rhyming can sometimes be so good that you don't even notice it (Shakespeare does this all the time, as does Kay Ryan). Her approach is much gentler than line-ending-rhymes, mixing rhymes in the middles of lines like the chocolate chips in batter. They float around at will, never truly random but always right on time. They are gentle reminders of disparate unity and of the importance of repetition.
In our age of perfectly accurate reproductions, repetition becomes annoying, grating, a thing to be avoided and forgotten. But when humanly repeated, as is best experienced in poetry and live music, the repetition changes as it repeats. This is the purpose of rhymes: similar sounds used as signposts, landmarks in the dark to help get home.
Kay Ryan writes with an obvious love for language; without compulsion, without deadening strictness, but also without overly-loose flapping in the wind. Her poems talk to each other like relatives; the echoes re-echo in ways which reward re-reading, which is a mark of the best writing. They somehow feel at once timeless and modern. They reference the ancients, but they never burden or exclude. They "do not mind belonging to / a dying vision", which is misleading, because her poetry is so full of life. Even read silently in your head, they sound great:
A PALPABLE SILENCE
What is as delightful
as a palpable silence,
a creamy latex of a
silence, stirrable
with a long stick. Such
a silence is particularly
thick at the bottom, a
very smooth lotion, like
good paint by the gallon.
This is a base silence,
colored only by addition,
say a small squeeze of
green when the bird sings
idly of trees he has
seen. It is a clean
silence, the kind that
does not divide us,
like dreams it is
viscous but like good dreams
where sweet things last and
last past credibility
Even in the dream we know
it is a luxury.
If you ask me the meaning or themes of this collection, I'd say you missed the point: it's a record of playfulness, a blip of joy in a sea of overly serious writings which think too highly of themselves. Certain lines are stuck in my mind, like "Right twigs blaze red / as the parts of the Bible Jesus said" (about a bird making a nest) and "Oh birds shall / be cinders and dogs shall curl like / shrimps" (about Pompeii). Maybe her ancient callbacks and animal musings are ways of linking us to the parts of the world we often feel distant from, and maybe they're just broken branches floating by on the effortless river of internal rhymes. Either way, I can't complain. Like with all the best books, I couldn't help but re-read this immediately after finishing, a willing repetition invited by its short length. This is why I love poetry: it doesn't impose; you probably feel uncomfortable reading it because your ideas are so wrong, and you're too timid to let go of them and just float. But life is a river, and if you're too stiff, you'll drown.
In our age of perfectly accurate reproductions, repetition becomes annoying, grating, a thing to be avoided and forgotten. But when humanly repeated, as is best experienced in poetry and live music, the repetition changes as it repeats. This is the purpose of rhymes: similar sounds used as signposts, landmarks in the dark to help get home.
Kay Ryan writes with an obvious love for language; without compulsion, without deadening strictness, but also without overly-loose flapping in the wind. Her poems talk to each other like relatives; the echoes re-echo in ways which reward re-reading, which is a mark of the best writing. They somehow feel at once timeless and modern. They reference the ancients, but they never burden or exclude. They "do not mind belonging to / a dying vision", which is misleading, because her poetry is so full of life. Even read silently in your head, they sound great:
A PALPABLE SILENCE
What is as delightful
as a palpable silence,
a creamy latex of a
silence, stirrable
with a long stick. Such
a silence is particularly
thick at the bottom, a
very smooth lotion, like
good paint by the gallon.
This is a base silence,
colored only by addition,
say a small squeeze of
green when the bird sings
idly of trees he has
seen. It is a clean
silence, the kind that
does not divide us,
like dreams it is
viscous but like good dreams
where sweet things last and
last past credibility
Even in the dream we know
it is a luxury.
If you ask me the meaning or themes of this collection, I'd say you missed the point: it's a record of playfulness, a blip of joy in a sea of overly serious writings which think too highly of themselves. Certain lines are stuck in my mind, like "Right twigs blaze red / as the parts of the Bible Jesus said" (about a bird making a nest) and "Oh birds shall / be cinders and dogs shall curl like / shrimps" (about Pompeii). Maybe her ancient callbacks and animal musings are ways of linking us to the parts of the world we often feel distant from, and maybe they're just broken branches floating by on the effortless river of internal rhymes. Either way, I can't complain. Like with all the best books, I couldn't help but re-read this immediately after finishing, a willing repetition invited by its short length. This is why I love poetry: it doesn't impose; you probably feel uncomfortable reading it because your ideas are so wrong, and you're too timid to let go of them and just float. But life is a river, and if you're too stiff, you'll drown.
March 23, 2020
This is the fifth book of hers I've read. So far, I liked Erratic Facts the most, and this one, her first book, the least. Not that there weren't several gems, and the pleasing sounds and rhythms are extant, but I seemed to connect with fewer of these poems than usual.
..............
Excerpt, from ‘Prologue’:
Like boulders rolled away from doors,
like meteors, things rumbling
in my brain ask me
to go out like Moses
into some wilderness.
Heavens Need Furnaces
Heavens need furnaces,
The factories where dross
converts to light gasses.
The sloughed skins of dreams
are instant fuel, remarkably
full of oil like creosote
bushes. Your worst losses
warm angels; despair puts
a glint on God’s hair. And
the nicest surprise is
the substance that rises
when you know you can’t
get there from here.
..............
Excerpt, from ‘Prologue’:
Like boulders rolled away from doors,
like meteors, things rumbling
in my brain ask me
to go out like Moses
into some wilderness.
Heavens Need Furnaces
Heavens need furnaces,
The factories where dross
converts to light gasses.
The sloughed skins of dreams
are instant fuel, remarkably
full of oil like creosote
bushes. Your worst losses
warm angels; despair puts
a glint on God’s hair. And
the nicest surprise is
the substance that rises
when you know you can’t
get there from here.
March 11, 2017
It's safe to say I read the spots off of this one...it seems I've been selecting books (lately) that have hit too close to home in my mind. Strangely Marked Metal is one of many that have got me thinkin'...a lot. Goodness knows, I think enough, a mental traveler far and wide, but sometimes I need a little direction, and books often cure what ails my wanderings.
In particular, The Admirable Bede. 7th Century English Historian was a timely treat. Here's a bit of it about halfway through...
Every century and fraction/ of century is disheartened; part of every home/ and monastery is turned against itself;/each man has something withered/ or a misplaced tooth or an eye that wanders;/ each soul its own barbarian bent on plunder -/ call it Machiavelli; give him history,/ let him march through the city,/ let him name the streets and currency, let/ everyone bow down before his own worst possibility/ manifest; there will be the other part of the city- / like the flower which thrives on neglect, or/ the grace by which monuments slide down to stacks/ upon which some shepherd sits, half loving,/ half hating his life, drawing his flute/ out of his sleeve, one eye on the clouds/ one eye on the sheep.
Timeless, timely. I keep revisiting so much of this little book that its nigh dogeared to death, it's tiny spine creased. Wisdom and whimsy. A human document.
I've marked it as "finished" as of today, but I'm not finished, yet.
I love it.
In particular, The Admirable Bede. 7th Century English Historian was a timely treat. Here's a bit of it about halfway through...
Every century and fraction/ of century is disheartened; part of every home/ and monastery is turned against itself;/each man has something withered/ or a misplaced tooth or an eye that wanders;/ each soul its own barbarian bent on plunder -/ call it Machiavelli; give him history,/ let him march through the city,/ let him name the streets and currency, let/ everyone bow down before his own worst possibility/ manifest; there will be the other part of the city- / like the flower which thrives on neglect, or/ the grace by which monuments slide down to stacks/ upon which some shepherd sits, half loving,/ half hating his life, drawing his flute/ out of his sleeve, one eye on the clouds/ one eye on the sheep.
Timeless, timely. I keep revisiting so much of this little book that its nigh dogeared to death, it's tiny spine creased. Wisdom and whimsy. A human document.
I've marked it as "finished" as of today, but I'm not finished, yet.
I love it.
November 12, 2019
I wanted to go back and read or reread all of Kay Ryan. I think she is the most brilliant poet writing today.
This is her first book, published 35 years ago. You can see she is at the beginning of her art and has not fully come to form with the brilliance of her later works. But there is still much that is good here. As with Emily Dickinson, she writes short poems in a fluid, rhythmic style all her own. There is internal rhyming that will jump out at you at certain points and really hit home. She is a poet that makes you think. And gives a reader pleasure, as do the best poets.
This is her first book, published 35 years ago. You can see she is at the beginning of her art and has not fully come to form with the brilliance of her later works. But there is still much that is good here. As with Emily Dickinson, she writes short poems in a fluid, rhythmic style all her own. There is internal rhyming that will jump out at you at certain points and really hit home. She is a poet that makes you think. And gives a reader pleasure, as do the best poets.
November 2, 2008
It was heartening to go back after reading a few of her later books to see that Ryan's first collection is a little underdone, her style not fully formed, and to see her development more clearly.
June 17, 2019
That lambent rustle of thought-making-words into worlds, like in LeGuin or Jeffers or others of the San Joachins.
August 18, 2008
I really like her plain spoken but deep language. She offers new meaning to Moses' Ten Commandments in "The Tablets" by posing the question where were they before Moses. The phrase 'strangely marked metal' suggests uncommon beauty in the poem and is an apt phrase for the entire collection.
December 5, 2008
i love how a small phrase can sneak up on the page and put a smile on my face...
Read
July 28, 2011Good mind, good phrasing.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews