I first heard Connolly Ryan read some of his lines back in the ’90s. In a mincing, faux-British accent, he began, “If I were a nanny, or two or three… .” The unbridled silliness of that line seemed perfectly inappropriate arriving amid the usual high seriousness of a poetry reading. It violated all the assumed rules, and demolished any sense of the ever-fashionable “poet tone,” that sing-song, half-monotone delivery that makes reading aloud even your grocery list sound extra profound.
Ryan wasn’t throwing down an aesthetic gauntlet so much as just being himself. I still remember the effect of the absurd playfulness of that opening line—even the most serious-minded poets in the audience giggled. Maybe a few of them dismissed Ryan then and there, but if they did, it was unwarranted: in his poems, humor doesn’t crowd out what he finds important, even what he finds seriously important. Instead, it sneaks that seriousness in.
It wasn’t long after that initial encounter with his work that I saw Ryan deliver more of it in a very different context. This time, he went on stage before a rock band, and he spouted puns and crazy mash-ups of words like something between a stand-up comic, a storyteller and a rapper. Before long, he’d formed a band of sorts as a vehicle for his words, and he’d developed a reputation as someone who could fearlessly entertain a crowd in contemporary America. With poetry.
Standing around in Pulaski Park in the middle of downtown Northampton, Ryan seems like he’s in his element, even though he teaches across the river at Umass-Amherst, and he’s moved from Northampton down the road to Florence. Sure, it’s technically the same town, but Ryan assures me the culture is quite different.
He’s recently completed a long poem about Northampton that became Strictly Pedestrian, the second in a pamphlet series from Greenfield’s Shape & Nature Press. Its premise is a “flaneur” walk through the Paradise City. The walk in his poem begins on the spot where we stand, with observations of the population of Pulaski Park, two of whom were throwing down in a verbal confrontation just in time to make the poem’s early lines.
It’s a bright, hot day, and a few people loll in the grass. Nearby, a crowd silently awaits the bus. The park’s benches are occupied by folks who seem to be staking claims more than relaxing. All of this goes down mere feet from Main Street and some of its toniest shops. The jostling together of so many elements, he says, is quintessential Northampton.
His wordplay bubbles quickly to the surface. “I think of Northampton as the combination of the picturesque and the grotesque,” he tells me.
In a few minutes, he’s warmed up to the verbal task yet more, throwing out improvised combos of words that do unexpected things. It’s clearly not affectation. At one point he delivers, in passing, a pair of words that have probably never appeared together in the history of the language: “Darwin spasm.”
That kind of play fills his lines, too. From Strictly Pedestrian: “For each pair of passers-by eyes/ are spools of a spirit either broken or intact/ which define the rubric of fabrics/ (from the rueful to the fabulous)/ that makes Northampton what it is.”
All that sparking and slipping through the mother tongue is par for the course for Ryan. It seems to amuse him as much as anyone, and it’s like a road map revealing the weird route of electricity through his synapses. His poetic guidebook to Northampton may well be destined to become the definitive one.•
Connolly Ryan leads a two-hour, literature-fueled walk through Northampton Sept. 12 at 5 p.m., beginning at Pulaski Park, Northampton. An afterparty follows at Packard’s, 14 Masonic St., Northampton.
Q&A with Connolly Ryan
Valley Advocate: Though you have an MFA in poetry, your work possesses a kind of zing and punning energy that’s not what people expect of “academic” poetry. Where does that kind of voice come from?
Connolly Ryan: I would much prefer that people considered me more a hypodermic poet than an academic one, injecting strangely encouraging voltage into the veins of normalcy is what I set out to do, and I guess that is where the zing and punning comes in. Academic poetry is, at its best, a wheezing emporium of manufactured hysteria, and at its worst a bewildering pilgrimage into sensual repression.
Have you tried on other styles?
I would say that the style I’ve been experiencing of late has been decidedly more quiet, more serene, and more patient with its ability to accumulate meaningful mileage independent of my coaxing and coddling.
You’ve long been known in the Valley for your habits of opening for, even fronting, rock bands with your poetry. How (and when) did you get into that?
I began reading poems as part of an open mic night at the Bay State Cabaret in the mid-’90s. I was somewhat of an anomaly, because all the other acts were musical and often of the heartfelt and charmingly vulnerable persuasion. A trembling folk singer would pour his heart out about a brutal break-up and then I would walk up there, make some affectionately disparaging comment about that last song, and then rip into an irreverent narratives about, say, running around Northampton one day in desperate need of a bathroom in which to evacuate my… etcetera, throw in some slapstick adjectives and well-oiled verbs, innovate a couple of observation-grenades if I heard someone talking over my poems, and bam—it all fell into place.
Looking back, I imagine part of my allure was that I employed the urgency of a failed stand-up comedian who really had nothing to lose and nothing to gain except perhaps his virginity and some more weight. Little by little, I developed a loyal fan-base and instead of reading poems, I would just wing it up there while the ridiculously instinctive Henning Ohlenbusch played a guitar behind me that was gracefully unassuming as it was melodically all-consuming. Please don’t ask me to explain what that means. Anyway, I eventually cultivated a reputation as a momentous bar poet who could summon raucous sonnets from the boozy air and consequently set the proper improper mood for various local rock shows.
Do you still give those rock band readings? What have you been up to poetically in recent years?
My shtick eventually morphed into two under-the-scenester-radar bands called, respectively, Sit On My Faith and Pocketful Of Sexchange. I had a lot of fun with those talented ensembles and pretty much sprayed most of the rock-poesy out of my cistern—that’s fancy-talk for system. Nowadays I try to write a poem a day and have been pretty lucky in that regard. Content-wise, I alternate between satire with a heart and nature poetry with an edge. When I am in a delicate mood, I try to convey the sanctity and beauty of said mood, and when I am in an indelicate mood I focus my ink on darker subjects such as predators, hubris, dehumanization, and Facebook, all the while trying to maintain a measure of composure and playfulness lest my spirits sink and I never open my mouth or heart or notebook again.
What should the uninitiated expect if they tag along with you on your Sept. 12 walk through Northampton?
The tone of the tour will be a seamless hybrid of the giddy and the gritty, of the boisterous and buoyant, of the grotesque and picturesque, of the wordy and the wordless. Good exercise, too.
What do you think of the place? Do you consider yourself a Northamptonite?
I am a recovering Northamptonite—I like how that almost rhymes with kryptonite, he whispered cryptically. Just as I was once a recovering Manhattanite—not to be confused with a recuperating Hottentot. Now I am but a simple Florentian—a resident of Florence, Mass.—who experiences Northampton through the lens of an ex-patriate, which is to say fondly, but only in Lilliputian doses.
Picture an Oklahoma farm-girl in New York City—she at first is charmed by the razzle-dazzle, then faintly discombobulated, and after a few hours she just feels downright frumpy, oppressed and self-conscious, what with her bumpkin apparel and provincial world-view contaminated and all. That’s me in Northampton, a somewhat sullied Southern belle. Which is not to say I don’t like to feel that way.•
You Walk the Streets as if They Were Woods
You walk the streets with a majesty
usually reserved for racehorses
stomping to death the faces
of the drunks who curse them.
Not to romanticize you but
your countenance is a panacea
for incendiary panic—an escape-
hatch through which one may
ditch his/her irrational fear
of April and other pretty names.
Shakespeare once said something
along the lines of how
humans tend to dismantle
beauty before releasing it
(or was that Charlie Brown?)
Either way, both were right
because both bothered to interrogate,
delicately, the monstrous division
between what is and what isn’t,
just as you do when you walk
on the sidewalk as though it were a footpath
and laugh (or cry, depending on their beak-tilt)
at the sparrows scuffling over bread-flakes,
moved by the browns of their tufts
and the blues of their lives.
