Reading as Writer (poetry)

“Waste” by Kay Ryan

Not even waste
is inviolate.
The day misspent,
the love misplaced,
has inside it
the seed of redemption.
Nothing is exempt
from resurrection.
It is tiresome
how the grass
re-ripens, greening
all along the punched
and mucked horizon
once the bison
have moved on,
leaning into hunger
and hard luck.

I don’t know if this is entirely appropriate (this poem wasn’t assigned as a reading in the book/in a packet), but I figure I’m doing pretty much the same thing anyway…

First I have to mention that this poem is very obviously “skinny.” It was a point you mentioned in class, speaking of writers crafting longer or shorter lines, and Kay Ryan was your example, and if it’s true of all of her work, then this is one example, and a good one. Her lines have such a strong economy, and that’s funny, given the content of the first two lines of the poem. “Not even waste is inviolate…” The poem is a vertical line, traveling downward, looking forward to an eventual destination. That Ryan divides her sentences between lines (the first two lines are a short, “shared” sentence) speaks to the flow of it. It is spoken with a quick cadence, and we don’t stumble as we read it, but continue on to the next line all the way to the end of the poem.

Ryan uses internal rhyme to move the piece forward, and also utilizes rhymes at the ends of her lines to bolster ends of sentences. Near the beginning, we see “inviolate” rhymed with “it” (line 5), and later, “redemption” rhymed with “resurrection.” Later, we see internal rhyme dominating more of the soundscape, though it is also present in the beginning of the piece. Some examples are the “a” sound in “waste” and “day,” the hard “e” sound in “redemption,” “exempt” and “resurrection” (three adjacent lines), the “i” sound in “tiresome” and “ripens,” and the “u” sounds in “punched,” “mucked,” “hunger” and “luck.” There is also some repetition (the “mis” in “misplaced/spent”) and a general feeling of consonance, given by words like “punched” and “mucked” and “hunger” and “hard luck.” It’s an elegant construction. The sounds of the vowels are varied (the “ee” in “greening” and the “eye” in “horizon” and the middling “redemptions” and “resurrections.”

Replicating this kind of work is going to be difficult for me, but I’ll post the results below.

Hope is a small
thing, hardly
worth the effort.
It is appalling
how often we
tell these lies
in front of children.
Impressionable minds
want to know,
and this is the
garbage we offer.
We may be tethered
down, but they
shouldn’t suffer
for our years
of controlled descents
to basement dreams.