Florence poet and literature professor Connolly Ryan and I began our exchange by email, focusing on two of his poems, “Any Rain,” an elegantly crafted expression of gratitude for what he called, “the recurring miracle of rainfall,” and “Of All the Worlds,” a grittier poem that also begins with gratitude but very quickly has to face the reality of the Orlando nightclub massacre.
Ryan wrote that, though radically different in style and tone, the two poems share, “a hopeful surge of solidarity with the rest of the world, even though, both in this poem and in the real world, sorrow and terror are everywhere afoot.”
He continued: “There is a bellicose urgency to (“Of All the Worlds”) that I feel is an important conversation to have: every living entity on this planet is always vulnerable because we are, in small or large ways, all under attack (either by actual predators or our own hubris).
“Whether it be gay people being murdered in a nightclub, or poor people being demoralized by various forms of unreliable authority, the ecosystem in a carcinogenic chokehold or the imaginations of the young and old being immobilized and compartmentalized by little institutional screens … the idea that we are all connected through beauty and sorrow is the one gospel (good news) I believe in tirelessly spreading in a manner that is hopefully more inspiring than off-putting.”
“Of All the Worlds” flirts with being didactic, Ryan says when we sit down to talk later, which can be tricky. It’s a serious poem, but he wants it to “go under the radar” so that the reader doesn’t draw back, asking, “Is this guy preaching to me?”
Ryan, who teaches a great books class in the honors college at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says that he brings a lot of the philosophy from his reading to his work. Paraphrasing poet and essayist Wendell Berry, Ryan says that, “Once humans stopped being animals, we lost our marriage to the natural rhythm of things. Even the word ‘sin’ just means separation. It doesn’t mean you’ve done evil. … ‘Sin’ means ‘without.’ Without what? Without God? Yeah, but even more importantly, without God’s creation.”
Our estrangement from the natural world leads, as well, to our estrangement from each other and to the kind of dehumanization that results in a massacre like the one in Orlando or the recent incident in which private security officers for the Dakota Access pipeline company set dogs on protestors trying to stop the bulldozing of sacred tribal lands.
“Every time I write, I just want to become more intimate with my place in this world,” Ryan says. “Why was I given a voice? Why do I feel gratitude to the point of weeping sometimes? Is it about God? And the answer is it’s pretty much whatever the coyote is howling for. It could be hunger, it could be loneliness, it could just be, ‘I like hearing my voice!’”
Ryan laughs.
“I try to make each seemingly pastoral image crackle with the tension of our mistakes. And our only real mistake — I don’t believe in original sin — is that we’ve forgotten how to live in harmony with the world.”
He would love to live inside the world that a poem like “Any Rain” creates, Ryan says, with its, “delicate contours and welcoming corridors and little plashes of tenderness.”
“But there’s always something that’s going to disturb that or interrupt that. And you owe it to your existence to include that.”
Later, he adds, “There is a dilemma, which is the possible irreversibility of our narcissism. … People only wake up when they realize that they’re being damaged by the situations of others. My mission, if I’m said to have one, is just to wake myself up and do it with enough intimacy and universality that those who come across it think, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool. I like the way this guy’s keeping me stimulated and not preaching at me.’ It is a wake-up call and we all need it.”
Ryan will be featured reader Tuesday, Sept. 13, at Déja Word, an open mic series held every second Tuesday at the Déja Brew Pub & Café, 57 Lockes Village Road in Wendell. Doors open at 6:30 for open mic sign-up, with a 7 p.m. start.
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She can be reached at tcrapo@mac.com