Punk’s Reviews > Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose > Status Update
Punk
is on page 237 of 302
Ryan: "I love the picture of the pointing finger: I love to study it. I don't even care what it's pointing toward. I don't look where the finger instructs me to look. I look at the finger."
Which immediately brought to mind: "Remember that haiku is a finger pointing at the moon, and if the hand is bejeweled, we no longer see that to which it points." A quote I've seen attributed to James W. Hackett and RH Blyth.
— Jul 23, 2026 01:10PM
Which immediately brought to mind: "Remember that haiku is a finger pointing at the moon, and if the hand is bejeweled, we no longer see that to which it points." A quote I've seen attributed to James W. Hackett and RH Blyth.
2 likes · Like flag
Punk’s Previous Updates
Punk
is on page 229 of 302
"And that is one of the particular beauties of poetry as opposed to, say, the novel. A poem really has no beginning and end, although it does appear to. All parts of a poem exist as a sort of plasma, simultaneously apprehended, existing in the mind all at once, as soon as we have become familiar with them."
— Jul 22, 2026 02:04PM
Punk
is on page 194 of 302
Ryan writes about Joseph Brodsky, a man "sentenced in a sensationally absurd Soviet trial to five years of internal exile in the frozen North," and I put this book down and pick up Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which is right next to me because I've been reading it since 2023, slowly, because of the war crimes, and of course he's in there, so I reread his three poems.
— Jul 20, 2026 08:34AM
Punk
is on page 34 of 302
"Nonsense exists only in relation to sense. It uses the rules of sense but comes to different conclusions."
— Jul 08, 2026 08:07PM
Punk
is on page 12 of 302
In his introduction, the editor calls this book "a triumph." I'm sorry, sir, I think you mean the work is a triumph; the book is something you made by putting Ryan's work into an order you refuse to disclose.
— Jul 07, 2026 09:17PM
Punk
is starting
Reread! I intentionally ordered a used copy of this so I wouldn't feel bad about underlining all my favorite parts, but this withdrawn copy from the Denver Public Library looks like no one ever read it! Will I be able to write in a near mint book? Woof, I guess we'll see.
— Jul 07, 2026 08:11PM
Punk
is on page 264 of 302
"To my mind, poets should discourage the practice of poetry, by example."
— Apr 11, 2023 02:44PM
Punk
is on page 229 of 302
"A poem really has no beginning and end, although it does appear to. All the parts of a poem exist as a sort of plasma, simultaneously apprehended, existing in the mind all at once, as soon as we have become familiar with them."
— Apr 09, 2023 03:34PM
Punk
is on page 167 of 302
Bounced hard off the two Marianne Moore essays, though I can see her influence on Ryan's own poetry.
— Apr 05, 2023 09:13PM