Explaining what draws him to poetry, Connolly Ryan has a pretty, well, poetic answer: “I am interested in breaking down forms and expectations and then reassembling them in a way that is at once jarring and familiar, restless and satisfied, and poetry is just the right place for these placements and replacements to take place.”
The Florence resident, who’s 49, has had a long relationship with UMass Amherst: He earned an undergraduate degree and an MFA in poetry and then got what he calls a “febrile little niche teaching college writing.” Today he’s a full-time professor in the university’s Commonwealth Honors College, where he teaches a course titled “Ideas That Change The World.”
Hampshire Life: What is your creative process like?
Connolly Ryan: Sit, think and spin is pretty much the trinity of verbs that best describes the process. Sit, as in fold myself into the stillness stirring at the heart of all the activity around me; think, which is to say process and dissect the impressions and sensations of that dramatic stillness; and then spin, as in act as a loom who chronicles the luminous, encapsulates the subtle and imagines the unspeakable until it appears adequately palpable enough to attempt to grace the page.
H.L.: Does is start with a “Eureka!” moment?
C.R.: It’s more an eking out or alighting upon a satisfying cluster of visible sounds, then building on that cluster one nuance at a time. An example of a line that slips into existence when my intellect and ego don’t get in the way would be this line from a recent poem — “The mesmerizing reversal of icy lunacy” — which is describing the trance-like tranquility that a body feels when warmth makes a comeback after a long, morale-quashing winter.
H.L.: How do you know you’re on the right track?
C.R.: Mostly when I can feel the music and logic working in cahoots.
H.L.: What do you do when you get stuck?
C.R.: Try to enjoy the stickiness.
H.L.: How do you know when the work is done?
C.R.: That the poem is never truly finished is the only thing I’m really sure of, but that’s just a truth one has to learn to live with.
H.L.: What did you do most recently that relates to your art?
C.R.: Took a walk in the woods.
H.L.: To invoke e.e. cummings, how numb can an unworld get?
C.R.: number.
— Steve Pfarrer
Good Blood, Bad Blood
By Connolly Ryan
The good blood bangs amazing songs
and rings believable bells and delivers
credible covenants through your pulse,
while the bad blood slugs and skulks
its way through your veins like drug-
numbed lambs, dribbling bilge and smearing
malice and lunacy on the floors and walls
of its host. I have known both bloods.
And sometimes when the good blood
is flowering and spreading its wealth,
the bad blood inserts its glowering filth
and the mood of my blood gasps and winces,
placing clarity in a chokehold and rendering
gratitude a cuckold. In these moments all
I’ve loved and worked for keels death-wards
and I brace myself for a demoralizing seizure;
but right at that wrong point I recall the sweetness
of your despair-lassoing laugh and the depth
of our love-illumined unity, embattled and young
as it is, and the good-blood floodgates open anew,
and my heart flings open with them, softening
the strangling, estranging blows of the ill blood
and turning them, O merciful alchemy, into Love.