I love when friends and family send me things they know will ring my bell, so to speak. This one comes courtesy of dear Erin.
From an article about Kay Ryan the new Poet Laureate:
“In 1976 she finally realized that she could not escape the poet inside her. She had decided to ride a bicycle from California to Virginia in 80 days. Riding along the Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she said, she felt an incredible opening up, “an absence of boundaries, an absence of edges, as if my brain could do anything.”
“Finally I can ask the question: Can I be a writer?” The answer came back as a question, she said. “Do you like it?”
“So it was quite simple for me. I went home and began to work.”
Public recognition came slowly. It took 20 years for her to receive acclaim for her work. “All of us want instant success,” she said. “I’m glad I was on a sort of slow drip.”
