Ryan Black : part one

Ryan Black is the author of The Tenant of Fire (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Death of a Nativist, selected by Linda Gregerson for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. He has published previously or has work forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. 

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Is poetry uniquely capable of accomplishing more than other forms? I think it’s uniquely comfortable remaining in a place of unknowing. Or maybe it’s unique in that it’s sense of accomplishment or completion is different from other forms, but we’d have to ask a painter or an architect or an athlete about that.