In Lieu of Foreword:
Unconventional Fore-Words on an Unconventional Poet
“A poem is a walk,” wrote A.R. Ammons.[1] Ray Ryterski’s
poems confirm that credo. The long and winding lines
(justified on the right margin, as in prose, though often
effectively, and conscientiously enjambing) unwind as
peripatetic meditations. You will not find solutions in
this work. (No surprise: few poets presume—and still fewer
should presume—to problem-solve.) You will often encounter
despair (as heart-wrenching, as shocking, as Plath’s or
Sexton’s). But despite that despondency, and always (which
is why I’m wagering that this poet pushes past a premature
demise), you will be presented with Ryterski persevering.
And so
we get up and continue walking where our feet guide us
And then one day
leads to another day and another and another
Like trying to hold
sand, the time slips out from between our fingers
In fact, though, Ryterski’s wanderings yield tangible
destinations[2], generated in and by their
movement. As nearly put in the poem just cited, the
eponymous “We, Who Walked Beneath the Stars”:
I was looking for something that was absent but
was set down
I knew for a fact that the thing was lying around here
somewhere
To gloss the modus operandi, tweak the lines a bit: ‘I was
looking for something that was absent but about to be set
down / I knew for a fact that the thing was lying around
en route.’ In trying to explicate Ryterski’s
process, I similarly sought something absent yet set down,
which I knew for a fact lay somewhere in my library. But
where? Ah! the prose style of Ryterski’s
poems (as distinct from a style of prose; i.e.,
Ryterski’s pieces read as poems, “language charged with
meaning” [Pound[3]]) jogged my memory to Morris Croll’s
observation on such seventeenth century prose masters as
Burton, Bacon, Browne:
Their
purpose was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking,
or, in Pascal’s
words, la peinture de la pensée.
They knew that an idea separated
from the act
of
experiencing it is not the idea that was experienced.
The ardor of its conception
in the
mind is a necessary part of its truth; and unless it can be
conveyed to another
mind in
something of the form of its occurrence, either it has
changed into some
other
idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any existence
whatever except
a
verbal one. [They] chose as the moment of expression that
in which the idea first
objectifies itself in the mind, in which, therefore, each of
its parts still preserves its
own
peculiar emphasis and an independent vigor of its own—in
brief, the moment
in
which truth is still imagined.[4]
Numbering among
those truths-imagined-in-the-moment by Ryterski, “In the
Beginning,” in multiple senses of that phrase.—I.e., the
first pair of poems, that so titled and “We, Who Walk
Beneath the Stars,” instance a preoccupation with
inaccessible origins[5]:
I try
to think of who the very first person was, but for every
person that has existed
There is another
person that has come before them so no one will ever know
who
The original first
person was because even the original first has an ancestor,
correct
…
It still feels like
we’re taking the first step; we try to remember when
We took the first
step, but for every step one takes there is another
Someone took
before, so we’ll never know who took the original first[6]
The second
conceptualization recalls Seamus Heaney in “Bogland”:
Our
pioneers keep striking
Inwards
and downwards
Every layer they strip
Seems
camped on before.[7]
When the last word
ambiguously resonates between adverb and noun—such that in
effect, there is no last word, rather a vertiginous
enactment as well as expression of en abyme.
Which segues to remarking Ryterski’s own brand of
word-play. In “Hands,” for instance:
It’s funny how your hands can do so much and so little
simultaneously
My hands can help me type this poem and drink my third cup
of coffee
They can help me carry my things and shove favorite foods
into my face
But when push comes to shove, I can’t seem to get my hands
dirty with
The meaningful, impactful work that really needs to be done
in the world
Logopoeia,
or “the dance of the intellect with words” (both
Poundisms[8]) is displayed with remarkable felicity in
moving forth and back upon literal and figurative linguistic
registers (“Hands can help me shove…/push comes to shove/I
can’t seem to get my hands dirty.”)[9] Also characteristic
of particular craft, refreshingly irreverent diction. With
“shove favorite foods into my face,” cf. “I’m done with this
fuckery.” “Doppelganger In My Bedroom Mirror,” whence that
last locution derives, points up a further facet for
appreciation.
Ryterski will always prompt thought—better put, provoke
reflection. Which revision on my part goes so far as to say
that the musings this poet generates often trouble the
reader. Does so doing prove analogous to the plausible
conduct of Ray Ryterski’s “Doppelganger”? (Is it, to some
degree, a mirror image of each our own doppelgangers?)
I told
my therapist at the time about how there’s a doppelganger
following me
“What if the
doppelganger is trying to help you in some way?,” they asked
“I don’t think so.
If they were trying to help me, they wouldn’t cause me
pain.”
“Well, Ray,
sometimes the parts of us that cause us pain are trying to
help us,
But somehow go too
far. Maybe this part of you just went too far in helping
you.”
This poem concludes on a twist reminiscent of that
author—which author? “Borges, [or] the other one,”(?)
whose—whose?—meditation concludes, “I am not sure which of
us it is that’s writing this page.”[10] Similarly,
So when
you see me in the real world, who do you see walking around
as me?
Is who you see the
real me, or is the person you see the person from the
mirror?
We can read the
last line, hinging on “or,” appositively—“the real me” as
“the person from the mirror”—with our interpretation abetted
by construing “from the mirror” in reference (also) to the
person once before the glass who stepped away “from” it when
venturing “in[to] the real world.” Yet, typically,
Ryterski’s own words reflect (mot juste!) our
feelings, in this case of being haunted by ourselves.[11]
Though, to pivot on the analogy of doubles posited above, I
don’t think these poems “go too far…in helping us.” Rather,
they test, and attest to, the poet’s and reader’s respective
resolve.
ETHAN
LEWIS
Springfield,
Illinois, 2023
Notes
1.)
Ammons titled his 1967 essay thus.
2.)
This posited locus accessible through perseverance is
more emphatically remarked (though the precise terminus
remains ambiguous) in two remarkable poems of transit, “To
the Place Where the Black Sea Ends” and “Somewhere,
Anywhere, A Train Runs Through It.” Cf. also the resolve
expressed at the close of “What We Must Do” and of “What We
Haven’t Fixed.”
3.)
Cf. “How to Read” (1921), Literary Essays of Ezra
Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968);
Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions,
1935), 28. Pound compasses all “literature” within that
definition. Hence in retrospect, if one preferred to
categorize Ryterski’s writings as prose, certainly they
could. Yet I shall refer to them as poetry, due to their
rhythm, lineation, and as distinct from being prosaic.
4.)
Morris W. Croll, “The Baroque
Style in Prose” [1929; rpt. In] Alexander Witherspoon and
Frank J. Warnke, eds. Seventeenth-Century Prose
and Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 1066.
5.)
Ryterski rings variations on this concern in “Wall
Décor” and “Terracotta.”
6.)
Acknowledging what one can’t know much less return to
evinces frustration in these poems, but with respect to that
perseverence I’ve remarked, likewise spurs Ryterski forward.
The poet intuits that “one
person who started it all, starpower swirling in between
their palms…. I want desperately to be like them, to live
and to love like they do…What starpower do I hold? What do I
have to offer? / Instead of holding the universe I am
standing on shaky ground that isn’t mine;… / But I can write
a poem or two, so that is where I find myself in my own tiny
beginning.”
7.)
Seamus Heaney, Selected Poems 1966-1987 (New
York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990), 22-3.
8.)
“Logopoeia, ‘the dance of
the intellect with words, that is to say, it employs words
not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a
special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect
to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known
acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds the aesthetic
content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal
manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastic
or music. It is the latest come, and perhaps the most
tricky and undependable mode [as distinct from phanopoeia,
“a casting of images upon the visual imagination,” and
melopoeia, “wherein the words are charged, over and
above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which
directs the bearing or trend of that meaning”].”
(“How to Read,” 25)
9.)
Cf. a similar, though more dire, shuttling in “Face
the Curtain”: “I can’t kill myself for the life of me; for
the life of me, something’s holding me back.”
10.)
Cf. “Borges y Yo” (“Borges and
I”), Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans.
Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 324; Borges,
Collected Poems, ed. Alexander Coleman, trans.
Kenneth Krabbenhoft, et al. (New York: Penguin, 1999), 92-3.
11.)
As in, e.g., “Wall Décor,” which in the process of
framing our thoughts in Ryterski’s words, might also remind
(would it did the poet) of a tendency toward excessive
self-critique rather than fair acknowledgement of
achievement:
Sure, I won those awards on the wall alright, but there’s
nothing to celebrate since
They’re a constant reminder of how things could have been
compared to right now
This poem subsequently features a
lightning-flash in technique: an extraordinary
double-exposure
(the Japanese term it Kake-katoba),
whereby an adverb transitions “before” one’s eyes:
Room for the bright colors of the fabric to fill up the
empty space on the wall before
You knew it, you were taking down notes about what can stay
and what needs to go
