Fairfax Resident Wins Pulitzer

When the Pulitzer Prize awards were announced today, Fairfax resident and former US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, 65, was the winner of the $10,000 prize for poetry.

Ryan's book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems beat out two other finalists for the prestigious prize. The collection features over 20 new poems, but also brings together past work, with one poem dating back to the 1960s.

Ryan, who also teaches at College of Marin, moved to Marin in 1971. She has won countless awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and was named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008 - a post she filled for two years. Ryan's first book of poems, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, was self-published in 1983.

Kay Ryan poems, republished from the Marin Independent Journal:

Nothing Getting Past

If life is a

thin film

sandwiched between twin

immensities

of nothing

you get the best

taste of this

out west in

the open country

where a keen

could mean the

double scrape

of nothing almost

touching nothing

or the wind

coming through

dry grass. In

either case it's

pretty close

to nothing

getting past.

Say Uncle

Every day

you say,

Just one

more try.

Then another

irrecoverable

day slips by.

You will

say ankle,

you will

say knuckle;

why won't

you why

won't you

say uncle?

Hope

What's the use

of something

as unstable

and diffuse as hope

the almost-twin

of making do,

the isotope

of going on:

what isn't in

the envelope

just before

it isn't:

the always tabled

righting of the present.