A Ball Rolls on a Point - Noah Rubin - Week 7

Kay Ryan is very talented, and much of her work goes over my head. Her poems are dense, thoughtful, and meaningful. Regardless if I understand some of the complex metaphors and ideas, I manage to connect with the majority of her poems. For this week, I decided to share her poem called, “A Ball Rolls on a Point” because I really connected with her sentiment. The main idea is that we are like balls in that we have so much weight - involvement, care, focus, etc - on small points. A ball, in case you never thought about it before, balances all of its weight on a single point. We actually talked about this in physics last year. But anyway, it is interesting to think about; oftentimes we get caught up in things and focus every ounce of energy on that specific point - like a ball.

Ryan reflects that “the whole ball of who we are pressed intensely on any surface it is put on. She wonders if “we’ve lost proportion” - we can all think of times that we have maybe blown things out of proportion. But she notes that it’s not the ball’s fault, she explains that a ball could sit no other way - “As though bringing too much to bear too locally were our decision.” Here, the phrase “too much to bear too locally” means that there is too much weight or importance on such a small point. This poem made me definitely feel better about myself sometimes putting too much ‘pressure’ on small things in the heat of the moment.

I like writing about random things for these blogs, but these poetry blogs are honestly a nice excuse to read some meaningful poetry and reset my blog. 

You can hear her read the poem here, it’s only a minute long: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/play/75788