Ryan, Michael 1989
They slept and ate like us.
Feral they were not.
The intricacy of their handiwork
bespoke a fineness we’d be taught.
– Michael Ryan, “The Others”
Read an interview with Michael Ryan from How A Poem Happens:
How a Poem Happens
Michael Ryan’s Threats Instead of Trees won the 1973 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; , for which he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers Award, was a 1981 National Poetry Series selection; won the 1990 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and New and Selected Poems won the 2005 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Wanting leads to worse than oddity.
The bones creak like bamboo in wind,
and strain toward a better life outside the body,
the life anything has that isn’t human.
– Michael Ryan, “Where I’ll Be Good”
Watch Michael Ryan read his work at Poetry@Tech:
Poetry@Tech: Michael Ryan – Part 1
Poetry@Tech presents: Michael Ryan Fourth Annual Bourne Poetry Reading October 26, 2005 http://www.poetry.gatech.edu/index.php
