 
 
From the publisher;
The first-ever collection of essays by one of our most distinguished and distinctive poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan
Synthesizing Gravity gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan’s probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art.
A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets― including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson― Synthesizing Gravity bristles with Ryan’s crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and her appetite and appreciation for the genuine. Among essays like “Radiantly Indefensible,” “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks,” and “The Abrasion of Loneliness,” are piquant pieces on the virtues of emptiness, forgetfulness, and other under-loved concepts. Edited and with an introduction by Christian Wiman, this generous collection of Ryan’s distinctive thinking gives us a surprising look into the mind of an American master.
Review:
Synthesizing Gravity is a collection of Ryan’s prose written over thirty years. It includes comments on poems and notes about some of my favorite poets, including Philip Larkin, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens (his letters), Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams. I’m a wonk. I love to read about the writers who influence my favorite creators and Kay’s commentaries are insightful and almost like overhearing her think-alouds through a closed door.
In addition to her thoughts on other poets and their influence on her, I enjoyed her essay about the dangers of keeping a writing notebook. Her assertion is that the essence of creativity is in capturing the essence of memory itself, that what is needed to create is already in the mind. By writing things down, we imbue those particular utterances with an importance that may ultimately come to nothing when it is time to create. She tells you, “Almost everything is supposed to get away from us.” It’s not the concrete we rely on to create, it’s the abstract, that ephemeral quality that is left behind when time and memory have had its way with something. We want to see, but not so much that we obfuscate the abstraction we are trying to reach for.
We need to let memory assert its power. Writing them down and relying on those writings robs the writer of that power to simply associate what is in the mind, and trust that instinct to connect and create something meaningful.
I get the feeling, each time I read the memoirs and meditations of the most powerful writers, what I am discovering is that there is power in crushing the obstacles that stand in the way between the artist and their creation. In other words, the more direct conduit we can find to our subconscious and the seat of our creativity, the more authentic and powerful our art will be.
A stunning, revealing read.
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