Kay Ryan

Poetry, however, "is the most complicated thing. It's the most beautiful sport. I am always a student of poetry, and in it I find a rest that I don't find anywhere else, whether writing my own or reading the masters. And by rest I mean not quiescence or stop, but release. What poetry does is put more oxygen into the atmosphere. Poetry makes it easier to breathe."

Ryan attributes her penchant for brief poems to "a short attention span. Actually, the way I write is to melt all the materials in my brain at once, like those cyclotrons in which they get atomic matter really hot and get it to do weird things. I have so many things that I like to do at once, that I can't do very long poems. It's hard to sustain. And I seem to be able to say what I want to. I'm very satisfied with short poems."

Kay Ryan. Poet.