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Shipwreck (audio only)

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Kay Ryan
1945 –

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Kay Ryan
Photo credit: Kay Ryan

The author of several collections of poetry, Kay Ryan has served as both a Poet Laureate for the Library of Congress and a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets.

About Kay Ryan

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More by this poet

Only the Beginning of the Sharpness

What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

It’s hard for
the master
sharpener after
all that work
to have the shaft
taken for the point.
People run themselves

Kay Ryan
2024

Even on the Greatest Subjects Too Much Can Be Said

Montaigne

You can oversell
the sea, say, or
the way we miss
the dead. The littlest
bit of absence excites
oceans. And of oceans
the less said the
better: the wet beyond
the land: we have a

Kay Ryan
2024

Immense and Inclined to Pulse

Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time.
W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country

There is a webby and
exalted state of
comprehension wherein
discrete events—like the
rigging lights of separate
boats upon a midnight
ocean—suggest a net:

Kay Ryan
2024

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