Kay Ryan's Democratic Élitism

I’d like to briefly compare two reviews of Kay Ryan’s new poetry collection The Best of It: Adam Kirsch’s "Think Small" (The New Yorker, April 12, 2010) and Helen Vendler’s "The Art of Flamingo Watching" (The New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010). I’m going to focus on the way Kirsch and Vendler treat one of Ryan’s best known poems, “Outsider Art.” This is because “Outsider Art” challenges my belief, based on the poetry of Whitman, Bishop, O’Hara, Heaney, Schuyler, Simic, and others, that almost everything that exists deserves equal reverence and can become the subject of poetry. In “Outsider Art,” Ryan seems to be saying that this is certainly not the case in respect of certain folk art objects, which she describes as follows:

Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said –
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture.

Ryan couldn’t find the poetry in these objects, but she wrote a poem about them anyway, calling it “Outsider Art,” in which she says, “There never/seems to be a surface equal/to the needs of these people…./We are not/pleased the way we thought/we would be pleased.”

There’s no delight in this poem. “These people” reeks of condescension, affirming superior knowingness in the poet. “Outsider Art” does not effect what Seamus Heaney has called “the redress of poetry.” If Heaney was writing this poem, he would not have flinched from describing the ugliness of this “outsider art,” but he would have gone on to do something positive with the ugliness. Ryan simply looks at the objects, describes them in her bare bones style, and says, “We are not pleased.”

Adam Kirsch, in his New Yorker review, says that, "Reading The Best of It, it becomes clear that Ryan, like all genuinely gifted poets, is a democratic élitist, believing that many are called but few are chosen.” Based on my reading of “Outsider Art,” I would say that “democratic élitist” is an excellent description of Ryan. But it seems that Kirsch considers democratic élitism a poetic virtue, a quality shared by “all genuinely gifted poets.” I strongly disagree. Whitman is a genuinely gifted poet. In his verse, as John Updike has observed, “An ideal equality is extended not only to persons but to things as well” (see “Whitman’s Egotheism” in Updike’s Hugging the Shore, 1983). Just about the last thing you would think to call Whitman would be “élitist.” The same goes for the other poets I named above.

Kirsch, in his review, says Ryan “has no patience for the clumsy sincerity of what she calls, in one poem, ‘Outsider Art.’” I think he’s right. I suppose this is another example of her wonderful “democratic élitism.” What about respect for what she’s seen? It seems to me a better poet, a real poet, would’ve explored the otherness of that picture frame made of “burnt matches glued together.” The details of “Outsider Art” are fascinating, too fascinating to warrant Ryan’s deplorable de haut en bas “we are not pleased” attitude. Kirsch should’ve had the backbone to say so, instead of trying to make a virtue of Ryan’s superiority in relation to her subject matter.

Turning to Vendler’s review, I hoped she would say she disliked “Outsider Art.” After all, she has in the past approvingly described “an American pastoral aesthetic of the found, the cared-for, and the homemade” (see “New York Pastoral” in Vendler’s Soul Says, 1995). However, in "The Art of Flamingo Watching,” Vendler comes out in support of Ryan's elitism. Regarding “Outsider Art,” she says, “But like any aesthete, she is repelled by incompetent creation; and for all her well-wishing she draws back.” “Like any aesthete”? What about the aesthete who cherishes American pastoral? What about Stevens’s Tennessee gray jar and home-sewed, hand-embroidered sheet? What about Bishop’s doilies and hand-carved flute? “Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?” says Bishop’s Crusoe. Right there is the point that Ryan ignores – she’s as home-made as the chair “covered with things/the Savior said …/in nail polish/too small to be read” that she so snobbishly dismisses. In explaining and upholding the elitism of “Outsider Art,” Vendler shows an elitist streak of her own when she says, “Ryan is, despite her desert beginnings, a lover of Satie, a reader of Brodsky and Bishop; she cannot disavow her own talent, her intelligence and achievement.” Oh, please. Bishop was certainly not lacking in talent, intelligence, and achievement, yet she didn’t hold herself out as being superior to the homemade objects in her poems. Quite the opposite. As a poet, she empathized with them. As a poet, Ryan’s powers of empathy appear to be blocked.

Credit: The above portrait of Kay Ryan is by Jody Hewgill; it appears in The New Yorker (April 12, 2010) as an illustration for Adam Kirsch's "Think Small."