Michael Ryan
MICHAEL RYAN taught writing at Iowa, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and Warren Wilson College before becoming Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at UC Irvine. He has published an autobiography, a memoir, five books of poems, and a book of essays. Four of the books were New York Times Notable Books of the year. The autobiography was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and the memoir was excerpted in the New Yorker.
His poetry has won many awards, including the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition, he has won awards from The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review and the Poetry Society of America. Guy Novel is his first novel.
“But the truth enters at the end of life.It enters like oxygen into every celland the madness it feeds there in someis only a lucid metaphorfor something long burned to nothing,like a star.How do you get under your desire?How do you peel away each desirelike ponderous clothes, one at a time,until what's underneath is known?”
“THIS IS WHYHe will never be given to wonder muchif he was the mouth for some cruel forcethat said it. But if he were(this will comfort her) less than one momentout of millions had he meant it. So many years and so many turnsthey had swerved around the subject.And he will swear for many morethe kitchen and everything in it vanished --the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator doorhe had been surely propped against--all changed to rusted ironwork and ashexcept in the center in her linen caftan:she was not touched.He remembers the silence before he spokeand her nodding a little,as if in the meat of this gray wastehere was the signalfor him to speak what they had long agreed,what somewhere they had prepared together.And this one moment in the desert of ashstretches into forever.They had been having a dinner party.She had been lonely. A friend asked her almost jokingif she had ever felt really crazy,and when she started to unwind her answerin long, lovely sentences like scarves within herhe saw this was the waythey could no longer talk together.And that is when he said it,in front of the guests,because he couldn't bear to hear her.And this is why the guests have leftand she screams as he comes near her. ”
“Consider A MoveThe steady time of being unknown,in solitude, without friends,is not a steadiness that sustains.I hear your voice waver on the phone:Haven't talked to anyone for days.I drive around. I sit in parking lots.The voice zeroes through my ear, and waits.What should I say? There are waysto meet people you will want to love?I know of none. You come out strongerhaving gone through this? I no longerbelieve that, if I once did. Consider a move,a change, a job, a new place to live,someplace you'd like to be. That's not it,you say. Now time turns back. We almost touch.Then what is? I ask. What is?”