Source: Poetry Everywhere
This video segment from Poetry Everywhere features the poet Kay Ryan reading her poem “Turtle” at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Ryan has said that she develops her poems “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation”—is “Turtle” an example of that? Is the narrator’s description of the plodding animal an appreciation of its patience, or just an exasperated list of the turtle’s shortcomings?
For a biography of the poet Kay Ryan please visit the Poetry Foundation Web site.
“Turtle” at first read seems very clear: it is a half-humorous, half-wondering observation of a turtle moving slowly and with difficulty through the world. The poem relies on metaphor and simile: the turtle is “A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,” and her shell is “a packing-case” and a “load of pottery.” These images make the poem, at first glance, simply a comic take on a turtle.
But when the narrator describes the turtle’s internal world, the feeling changes. The turtle is a “she,” who can “can ill afford the chances she must take” to find food; she is living “below luck-level.”
What feeling do these descriptions create in the reader? Does the narrator admire the turtle’s perseverance in the face of so much difficulty, or does the narrator begin to feel impatient with the turtle’s imperfections? What are a turtle’s advantages?
How do we, the readers, feel about the turtle by the end? Or have we left the real world of a turtle following its path and entered a world of metaphor, where the turtle’s fate is everyone’s fate—to struggle with our shortcomings, unable to get rid of our own baggage, our own “load of pottery,” but somehow unaware of how we seem to others?
Read a biography of the poet Kay Ryan at the Poetry Foundation Web site.
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