Survival Skills

tags: Survival Skills, Kay Ryan, poetry, National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). My poetry suggestions are starting to run dry, which means I can start posting my own favorites (but you've seen many of those already) or you can send me your favorite poems, which I probably haven't read before!

Today's poem was suggested by a reader, Nan, who writes "I lurk around ScienceBlogs and always enjoy your column. Geese are my passion and I live sole femme with a small flock of nine of them and a dog and a couple of cats in a one-roomed cottage on a rural acre in Western Australia. [ .. Y]ou may like to consider your brilliant Californian, Kay Ryan. Her intellect is her subject and the reader is seduced, poem after poem, into taking her dense and oblique squizzes at the familiar as well as some mighty strangely dreamed propositions. I discovered her some years back, as I have many other poets, when I overheard someone reading Ryan out loud to someone else at a café table. Beware, should you not have used Kay Ryan before: Once you say a Kay Ryan poem, it's hard to stop turning it over and over to feel all the angles";

Survival Skills

Here is the virtue
in not looking up:
you will be the one
who finds the overhang
out of the sun
and something for a cup.
You will rethink meat;
you will know you have
to eat and will eat.
Despair and hope you keep
remote. You will not
think much about the boat
that sank or other boats.
When you can, you sleep.
You can go on nearly forever.
If you ever are delivered
you are not delivered.
You know now, you were
always a survivor.

-- Kay Ryan, Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. From Say Uncle: Poems (Grove Press; 2000).