Dew (poem)

choi

William Spiegelman, Artistry and Modesty, Rewarded. Wall Street Journal, Sept 19, 2020 (in the Review section that appears every Saturday).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/kay ... -by-joy-11600466756

Quote:

(a) "Kay Ryan, a national treasure who turns 75 on Sept 21, and who until quite recently was unknown. Fame came to her late: after quietly publishing for decades, she was named the United States Poet Laureate in 2008, won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2010 'The Best of It' (Grove, 270 pages, $17) and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011.  

(b) "Ms Ryan has had the benefits of a life lived on the edges, not at the center, of American academic culture. She grew up in the Mojave Desert, where her father was an oil-well driller. After a couple of years at Antelope Valley Community College she went to UCLA for bachelor's and master's degrees. She taught basic English composition for more than three decades at the College of Marin, alongside Carol dair, her spouse and fellow teacher.

(c) "They [her poems] are short, seldom more than a page long. The lines, too, are short

(d) "From the 1996 volume [read: publication or book] 'Elephant Rock,' 'Dew' [the poem] is as delicate as its eponymous, ephemeral subject [dew the thing]. Three sentences in 13 sprightly lines, the poem testifies to both the poet's observant eye and, even more, to her gift for what Aristotle termed the major criterion for poetic genius and success: metaphor.

"The longest sentence is the first: 'As neatly as peas / in their green canoe, / as discreetly as beads / strung in a row, / sit drops of dew / along a blade of grass.' Drops of dew are like peas; peas are like people in a boat [canoe]l dewdrops are also like jewels arranged in a necklace; they are, again, like people seaed, although people do not sit on a blade of grass. The tension between likeness and unlikeness pulls taut.

"Then this precarious delicacy gives way to something heavier: 'But unattached and / subject to their weight, / they slip if they accumulate.' With four syllables, that lst word is, appropriately, the poem’s heaviest. Weight leads to disruption, dispersal, sudden disappearance: 'Down the green tongue / out of the morning sun / into the general damp, / they're gone.' We are back to metaphors: the peapod, formerly [in sentence 1] a canoe, becomes a body with a tongue [grass balde] and the little drops of dew slide away.

Mote:
(a) WSJ holds the article behind paywall. There is  no need to read the rest.
(b) Donna Urschell, Chemistry, Dew and More. Library of Congress Information Bulletin, June 2009
https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0906/ryan.html  
(She [Kay Ryan] launched the evening with a reading of 'Chemistry,' a short poem about what happens to words when somebody dies. * * * [later in the evening] she read 'Dew,' which she described as a poem 'inveighing against the evils of combination.' * * * Donna Urschel is a public affairs specialist in the Library's Public Affairs Office")

The word combination here means aggregation.
(c) United States Poet Laureate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Poet_Laureate  ("The position was modeled on the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. * * * is appointed annually by the Librarian of the United States Congress")
(d) Mojave Desert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Desert
("Joshua trees, which are native only to the Mojave Desert * * * The spelling Mojave originates from the Spanish language [after] Mojave Tribal Nation * * * the word is a shortened form of Hamakhaave, their [Native Americans in the tribal nation] endonym in their native language, which means 'beside the water' ")
(e) Antelope Valley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antelope_Valley
(on "the western tip of the Mojave Desert. * * * The valley was named for the pronghorns that roamed there")
(f)
(i) College of Marin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_of_Marin
(1926- ; a public community college in Marin County, California)
(ii) Marin County, California
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_County,_California
(table: Named for [local Native American] Chief Marin [1781 - 1839] )
(g) Dew the poem:

As neatly as peas
in their green canoe,
as discreetly as beads
strung in a row,
sit drops of dew
along a blade of grass.
But unattached and
subject to their weight,
they slip if they accumulate.
Down the green tongue
out of the morning sun
into the general damp,
they're gone.