Yesterday the winners of the 2011 Pulitzer Prizes were announced. The honor in the Poetry category went to the collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press) by Kay Ryan. (Other finalists included The Common Man by Maurice Manning and Break the Glass by Jean Valentine.)
The Best of It is Ryans’ own selection of more than two hundred poems from her accomplished career. Before winning the Pulitzer, the book was already named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker.
Our poem of the day today is This Life, originally published in the 1994 collection Flamingo Watching (Copper Beech Press) and now included in The Best of It.
Congratulations to Kay and to all of this year’s winners!
~
This Life
It’s a pickle, this life.
Even shut down to a trickle
it carries every kind of particle
that causes strife on a grander scale:
to be miniature is to be swallowed
by a miniature whale. Zeno knew
the law that we know: no matter
how carefully diminished, a race
can only be half finished with success;
then comes the endless halving of the rest —
the ribbon’s stalled approach, the helpless
red-faced urgings of the coach.
~Kay Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress’s sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2008. Kay Ryan’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and other periodicals. The recipient of numerous accolades, including awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at the College of Marin.
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