repulsive and extreme

…I am convinced that for a poet to be great we must find ourselves repelled by some part of this poet’s work. Not just mildly disquieted, but actively repelled. So Marianne Moore is repulsive, extreme, in scrupulosity. (The great critic Randall Jarrell, in trying to describe what about Marianne Moore’s poetry put readers off, listed “her extraordinary discrimination, precision and restraint, the odd propriety of her imagination.” He adored her work, by the way.) There has got to be a fanaticism—it doesn’t matter, it can be the fanaticism of fastidiousness—but there has got to be some private path the reader just can’t follow all the way. There must be a crack in the poet of some sort. It has to be deep, privately potent, and unmendable—and the poet must forever try to mend it.

—Kay Ryan, “Inedible Melon,” Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (Grove Press, 2020), 142.

not human

Poetry’s feelings are not human feelings; we know the difference. There is some deep exchange of heat for cool that I’m trying to get at, something that I see operating in nonsense and that I believe gives poetry much of its secret irresistibility and staying power (we are not exhausted by it and must always revisit it).

—Kay Ryan, “A Consideration of Poetry,” Synthesizing Gravity (Grove Press, 2020)

[I don't believe this a bit. But I must acknowledge other views re poetry.]

better not best

Her poetry wasn’t hard to like; but it was difficult to admire. [Thinking of Kay Ryan]