Kay Ryan responds,
I would like to thank David Fenza for his characterization of me as “proud to be a miner while she prays for the shafts to collapse in order to preserve the purity of her labor.” This is something I have tried to express for myself, but it’s always so much more powerful when it comes from someone else.
Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Ryan’s tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared…