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    A Study Guide for Kay Ryan's "Blandeur"
    A Study Guide for Kay Ryan's "Blandeur"
    A Study Guide for Kay Ryan's "Blandeur"
    Ebook37 pages24 minutes

    A Study Guide for Kay Ryan's "Blandeur"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Kay Ryan's "Blandeur," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535819602
    A Study Guide for Kay Ryan's "Blandeur"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Kay Ryan's "Blandeur" - Gale

      14

      Blandeur

      Kay Ryan

      1997

      Introduction

      In Blandeur, Kay Ryan presents an unusual request: she asks God to make life less vivid. Suggesting numerous ways in which God might reshape the earth's landscape to lessen its grandeur, Ryan paints an evocative tableau of the upheaval required to achieve a neutral state. In one deft move at the end, Ryan shifts her attention from exterior landscapes to interior ones, asking God to relieve people's hearts.

      Ryan is known for packing musicality, word-play, dense rhyme, wit, and melancholy into slender poems of ideas. Many critics have therefore characterized her poems as compressed—while their surface is accessible, her slim lines hide many layers of artistry and meaning. First published in the New Yorker in 1997, Blandeur is exemplary of Ryan's poetic technique and thematic palette, as well as her gift for surprising and intriguing readers. The poem appears in Ryan's fifth collection, Say Uncle (2000), and in her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010).

      Author Biography

      Not unlike her deceptively simple poems, the career of poet Kay Ryan exemplifies quiet surprise. A remedial writing teacher at a community college, Ryan did not become a poet until age thirty and did not produce her first book until she was nearly forty. She proceeded to produce poetry that diverges from that of many post-modern contemporaries, offering slender, plain-language yet highly musical poems that flirt with formal meter and make extensive use of rhyme. She labored for years in relative obscurity, but in 2008, despite a reputation for being a more withdrawn poet, Ryan was chosen to serve as US poet laureate. In 2011, Ryan won both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for her collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, and a MacArthur Fellowship, better known as the Genius Grant.

      The daughter of an oil driller, Ryan was born Kay Pedersen on September 21, 1945, in San Jose, California. Ryan spent her youth in the more remote parts of Southern California—the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. The influence

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