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Diana
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Kay Ryan’s Eerie Frivolity
American Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010, Kay Ryan is a master of miniature verse. What often stands out to first-time readers of her work is neatness of shape, delicacy of line, and rhymes that land not with a thump, but a nice pat—to borrow from Derek Attridge. It’s odd, then, that Ryan’s sonnets, so minute and orderly, can be so unsettling. As Willard Spiegelman writes of Ryan: ‘She often keeps the terror under wraps, but it is there.’ The idea that the tiny could be terrifying isn’t exactly new: as early as 1757, Edmund Burke argued that things lacking great dimensions are nevertheless ‘capable of raising ideas of the sublime’. He reasons: we can’t call a thing ‘trifling’—say, a small serpent—if it frightens us to death.
Ryan’s ‘non-sonnets’ feature all kinds of disquieting things, from beasts to grief to the end of the earth, but it is her peculiar art of minification—taking the short verse form of the sonnet and reducing it further—that lends her pieces their formal eeriness. In collections like Erratic Facts (2015), Ryan uses compression, circularity, and off-kilter rhymes to create feelings specific to the ‘minimalist sublime’—frenzy, giddiness, astonishment, and confusion. Winking at the sonnet form’s etymology, the poem ‘New Rooms’ concerns the mind’s discombobulation at encountering new things. At 14 lines--just—the poem’s wonky dimeter dances with ‘eerie frivolity’ (Michael Wood), performing the restless confusion that is poetic thought. This is typical of her sonnets, as critics like Deirdre Fagan have noticed. Rather than a ‘stepped progression toward the closing couplet’ (Princeton Encyclopedia), they tip us—rather comically—into the unnerving state of muddlement. We’re always left a little off balance at the end.
Touching on Burke, Kant, and Mark Fisher’s theories of the eerie, and alluding to Ryan’s sly predecessors (Poe, Dickinson, Frost), this paper examines ‘New Rooms’, alongside poems like ‘Sonnet to Spring’ from Elephant Rocks (1996) and the slinky, 14-line ‘Snake Charm’ from Flamingo Watching (1994), positioning them as key to Ryan’s revision of the American sonnet.
Ryan’s ‘non-sonnets’ feature all kinds of disquieting things, from beasts to grief to the end of the earth, but it is her peculiar art of minification—taking the short verse form of the sonnet and reducing it further—that lends her pieces their formal eeriness. In collections like Erratic Facts (2015), Ryan uses compression, circularity, and off-kilter rhymes to create feelings specific to the ‘minimalist sublime’—frenzy, giddiness, astonishment, and confusion. Winking at the sonnet form’s etymology, the poem ‘New Rooms’ concerns the mind’s discombobulation at encountering new things. At 14 lines--just—the poem’s wonky dimeter dances with ‘eerie frivolity’ (Michael Wood), performing the restless confusion that is poetic thought. This is typical of her sonnets, as critics like Deirdre Fagan have noticed. Rather than a ‘stepped progression toward the closing couplet’ (Princeton Encyclopedia), they tip us—rather comically—into the unnerving state of muddlement. We’re always left a little off balance at the end.
Touching on Burke, Kant, and Mark Fisher’s theories of the eerie, and alluding to Ryan’s sly predecessors (Poe, Dickinson, Frost), this paper examines ‘New Rooms’, alongside poems like ‘Sonnet to Spring’ from Elephant Rocks (1996) and the slinky, 14-line ‘Snake Charm’ from Flamingo Watching (1994), positioning them as key to Ryan’s revision of the American sonnet.
Diana Leca has a special interest in twentieth-century American literature and her research concentrates on short forms, such as the aphorism and the lyric fragment. She completed her doctorate at St. John's College, Cambridge on the topic of literary minimalism.