Kerry Ryan, the Warrior Poet

Today I interviewed a writer.

Kerry Ryan is a Winnipeg poet who just released her second collection, Vs. Her work has also appeared in a number of literary journals, but this latest collection heads in a completely different direction than you might expect. It’s the story of her journey into the world of amateur boxing, as she trained and competed in a white-collar boxing match last year.

I attended Kerry’s book launch at McNally Robinson last week and was fascinated by this young woman who went out punching people in the face and came back to write beautiful poems about it. She was definitely someone I wanted to talk to more, but I thought it would be best to keep a safe distance from her right hook. So we sent each other some emails, and here’s how it all went down.

AP- Hey Mrs. Ryan. I really enjoyed your reading last night; the whole poet-boxer thing fascinates me. How do you decide what to write about?

KR- OK, first off- please call me Kerry. (Otherwise, I feel like you're talking to my mom. :) ).

I'm a pretty lazy writer, so I usually write about things that are close at hand: if it's winter, I write poems about being cold; if I'm traveling, I write about landscape; if I'm spending a lot of time at the boxing club, well, I end up writing about boxing.

AP- You said during your reading that competing in boxing was one of your accomplishments that you're most proud of. Is this what made it a subject important enough to devote an entire collection to?

KR- I didn't set out to write an entire collection about boxing. I started writing the poems as I was training, as a way to process mentally what I was learning in the ring, and also as a way to rationalize my decision to fight. I thought they might one day be a chapbook or a section of a collection. But the more poems I wrote, the more it seemed like a cohesive story and suddenly I had a full length manuscript.

AP- Writing poems while training… isn't that distracting? Do you mean these poems are coming together in your head as you're physically training? You didn't write anything during an actual fight did you? That just sounds dangerous.

KR- Sparring required total focus, so poems were the last thing on my mind when I was in the ring. I started working on the collection during the same time frame I was training for my fight and I came to see writing as part of the process. First, the training was completely consuming, mentally. I really couldn't think about anything else for a couple of months, so it seeped in to my writing life. But I also used the writing to try to get my body and brain on the same page. I've always learned best by writing a concept out in my own words. So, I approached learning to box in the same way.

Check out the rest of the interview with more of my hard-hitting questions by clicking on this post!

AP- What was it about boxing that made it such a poetic subject?

KR- I actually find a lot of similarities between boxing and poetry and I think that's another reason why it worked for me as a topic. First, I was very taken with the language of boxing and how poetic it already is, very spare, immediate and direct. It also struck me that poems operate the same way boxers do -- both must be lean, economical, powerful, surprising. There's also the similarities in discipline between boxing and writing. Also, I think there are natural tensions in the sport of boxing that seem to work well for poetry: the boxer's own mental struggle to get in the ring, the challenge of competing, the beauty and discipline of the sport playing against the brutal backdrop of it. It's quite rich material for a writer.

AP- You said your poems became a cohesive story (of your experience). What/how did you write about the feelings you had after the match was all over?

KR- Most of the collection was written after the fight, but only a few of the poems deal specifically with those feelings. I think, ultimately, in life and in the collection, there wasn't a huge epiphany at the final bell, or as I had my hand lifted by the ref. In the end, it wasn't the fight itself that was important, but the process of getting there. That's why the poems deal almost exclusively with the training and preparation.

AP- Warrior poets are pretty rare today. Actually, it's not often you find any kind of writer that can throw down. After this experience, is it pretty safe to assume that you could beat up anyone in the poetry world?

KR- Well, I'm not one for trash talk. :) Margaret Atwood seems pretty scrappy, but she's too tiny to be in my weight class, so that just wouldn't be fair.

AP- Do you plan on fighting again?

KR- I never intended to fight more than once; I just wanted to see if I had it in me. I like the idea of retiring undefeated, but you never know.

Thanks Kerry! Check out Kerry’s great new collection, Vs., for sale at McNally here.

Also check out her blog to see what else she has to say! That’s right here.

And take a look through McNally’s events page, you know, in case you have assignments that require book launches or something. That’s… wait for it… here.