Miners' Canaries (by Kay Ryan) - video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co4NEMgpeuc
U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan reads "Miners' Canaries" during the Cleveland Public Library's Writers & Readers Series at the Louis Stokes Wing auditorium on Sunday 18 April 2010 in Cleveland, Ohio — amateur video by John Burroughs, a.k.a. Jesus Crisis, posted for educational purposes only. "Miners' Canaries" comes from Kay Ryan's 2010 book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (published by Grove Press).
For a schedule of upcoming Writers & Readers events hosted by the Cleveland Public Library, please visit http://writersandreaders.cpl.org.





Liked this one too.. Glad she read it twice... she drops her voice a little at the end so it was helpful to hear it again.
Very much up my alley for theme.... thanks for posting this.
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I wanted to add... I like that she says jokingly that her work is said to be accessible but even she (sometimes) doesn't understand it.. :-)
I could relate to that right away.... because sometimes I get ideas for things and write and a part of me doesn't know where it really all comes from.
And like you, I use words to convey ideas that are really more than the words. So I often wonder how accessible my poems are sometimes.
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A lot of times people mistake poems for "accessible" (unfortunately, often used as a euphemism for "superficial") because they haven't bothered to dig into them, pay them enough attention, put a worthwhile and well-deserved effort into peeling back the onion's layers.
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