Punk’s Reviews > Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose > Status Update

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.

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 I intentionally ordered a used copy of this so I wouldn't feel bad about underlining all my favorite parts, but this withdrawn copy from the Denver Public Library looks like no one ever read it!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.

"To my mind, poets should discourage the practice of poetry, by example."

"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."

Might have to read some Annie Dillard now. Recs?

Bounced hard off the two Marianne Moore essays, though I can see her influence on Ryan's own poetry.

"There must be a crack in the poet of some sort. It has to be deep, privately potent, and unmendable--and the poet must forever try to mend it."

"Though a person may be absolutely destined to be a poet, the person doesn't altogether understand this at first. For a long time the person just feels silly."

"Like the photographs kept from childhood, our journals do not save but wipe away, or overlay, memory."

"[Emily] Dickinson terrain is hard on the brain suspension."