“Rhyme,” said the poet, Kay Ryan, wearing a red scarf and a dark blazer, speaking to a packed audience at Seattle’s Hugo House, “is incredibly powerful – dangerously powerful.” 

The night’s guest speaker for Word Works hosted by the Hugo House and its executive director, Tree Swenson, Ryan exposed the crowd to many different sorts of rhyme during her talk, from repetition: “I believe repetition is a form of rhyme – just as a foot can’t step in the same river twice, a word doesn’t exist in the same way twice.” And the pun: where “two words are directly on top of each other.” And contested rhyme, which was displayed in a poem where the last rhyme was “why we” and “Hawaii” – contested because her partner would not recognize it as a suitable rhyme but rather as nonsense! And wedge rhyme: where a word is wedged, or split, and the rhyme then exists on the edges of two other words, like “exiled” and “extra child”.

In a way, I couldn’t believe I was in the audience to be a part of the talk. Kay Ryan is a hero of mine. As soon as I came upon her book, The Best Of It, which won a Pulitzer Prize and helped her become a two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, I was in love with her writing – it’s simple, in a way, clean. And I wasn’t alone – the large Hugo House audience was eating out of Ryan’s hand, complete with “Hmmms” and “Ahhhs” every few minutes.

Ryan read about a dozen of her poems, all of which were displayed on a large projection screen to her right (our left) that helpfully displayed the work on the page – the rhyme – as we listened along with her readings. “I write for the page,” she said. “I am interested in the theater that occurs in your mind.”

At times – and Ryan noted this recently occurred most viciously in the 1970’s – rhyme was looked down upon, something as easy, or childish. But she believes it a “kind of magic”. Tree Swenson agreed, saying the rhyme in Kay Ryan’s work – and I wonder if the rhyme is interesting to Ryan given the composition of her name – is the “buried treasure.”

But there are indeed rules. In fact, Ryan says, “Rule 1 through 100 of rhyme – when you use rhyme it cannot be gratuitous. It collaborates with sense and expands sense like a big hand goes into a glove.”

It was a pleasure to hear Kay Ryan talk, to see her poems, and to be in a crowd that loves poetry. Kay Ryan will release a new book of poems, titled, New Rooms – another title with a bit of rhyme – in 2015.