Aidan Ryan (poet)

---

File:Aidan Ryan Buffalo.jpg

Aidan Ryan in downtown Buffalo, New York (image courtesy Matthias Spruch)

Aidan Ryan (born Buffalo, New York) is an American writer and publisher, recognized in Best New Poets 2019 and known as co-founder of Foundlings Press, an independent literary publishing company.

Poetry

Ryan has published poetry in magazines and papers including Slipstream., Peach Mag, The Buffalo News, Buffalo Rising, The Honest Ulsterman, Octavius, and Ghost City Review. In 2017 the poet and novelist Janet McNally selected his poem "At the funeral of an atheist I didn't know" as the winner of that year's Just Buffalo Literary Center Member's Competition; it was published in the newspaper The Public.

In April 2017 Ryan published a collection of visual poetry, Organizing Isolation: Half-Lives of Love at Long Distance (Linoleum Press, 2017). In a review, the poet and publisher Rachelle Toarmino wrote, "The collection is a portrait of ultimates—love, religion, presence, absence—formed from the fragments of letters and postcards previously sent to Ryan by his loved ones. The resulting poems feed new life into moments whose hunger has long since abated," and that "The careful manipulation of the text speaks to the magical way we sometimes manipulate memories, given enough estrangement, in an attempt at what Ryan sharply terms 'organizing isolation.'" The reviewer also noted the book's unusual hardcover, letterpressed design: "[publisher Joel Brenden] adds stunning craftsmanship to Ryan’s vision and produced an art object that plays with themes of organizing and the intimacy of handwritten letters." That summer, Ryan performed poetry from his collection at the Just Buffalo Silo City Summer Reading Series, along with poet Mathias Svalina and filmmaker Mary Helena Clark.

Ryan was among 50 writers selected for Best New Poets 2019 by guest judge Cate Marvin.

Publishing

In 2015 Ryan co-founded a poetry publication, Foundlings Magazine, which later grew into Foundlings Press, based in Buffalo, NY. He currently serves as publisher. Foundlings co-founder and editor-in-chief Max Crinnin has called Ryan the "locomotive that keeps Foundlings chugging forward."

Foundlings Magazine and 'Whistle Stop' political poetry tour

The magazine published its first two volumes in May 2016 and January 2017, showcasing a mix of national poets and poets local to Buffalo. Ryan told the Canisius College Griffin student newspaper: "Once we graduated [college], we each were each set to move on to different things, and thought this might be our last opportunity to come together and do this one last creative project, which would keep us sane while we pursued jobs. So we started into looking towards creating a poetry magazine because we noticed a void in the Buffalo area for one."

Notably, in fall 2016 the magazine orchestrated a four-city reading tour with events on the nights of that year's presidential election debates (with stops in Rochester, Syracuse, and Fredonia, New York, and Toronto, Ontario), featuring poets including Dane Swan, Jacob Maier, and Robert Priest.

According to the Daily Orange, the impetus was the "'bullshit' [Ryan] had to listen to on TV and the radio, to read on blogs and in the papers" in the summer of 2016. "Everyone had to say something about the [2016 U.S. presidential] election, it seemed, and to him they were all wrong. ... Even during his trip in the Bahamas, he could not get away from the sound of Donald Trump’s 'impetuous whine' or Hillary Clinton’s 'stentorian self-righteousness,' as he called it. It was exhausting to be alive." To the Toronto magazine The Varsity, Ryan stated that "that the [presidential] debates suggested themselves as an organizing principle. We’d have four stops in four cities on the nights of the presidential and vice-presidential debates … Whistle Stop was born in a flurry of emails and phone calls over the course of the next month.”

Foundlings Press and growing impact

Following the decision to turn the magazine into a small literary press, Foundlings and, as its most frequent representative, Ryan, came to be associated in local and regional media with a newly revived and "uniquely Buffalo" city literary culture.

Buffalo News art critic Colin Dabkowski, in a feature on a Foundlings publication of a poetry chapbook by Lytton Smith, noted Ryan's efforts as driven by a "frustration about a lack of pathways to poetry for the uninitiated" and aimed at "broadening the appeal of poetry beyond elite circles of academics and aspiring bards." Interviewed on the Rochester radio program "Flour City Yawp," Ryan spoke of a "vacuum of leadership" since the death of the poet Robert Creeley, and a subsequent factionalism among groups of poets. He said of Foundlings Press that "we're not trying to start a revolution or anything, but I think that for an arts culture to be alive, it needs always to be changing, and we want to be part of that change."

In 2018 Foundlings Press debuted an imprint, The Public Books, operated in collaboration with The Public, a weekly newspaper in Western New York, largely made up of staff that departed the long-running weekly newspaper Artvoice. The publishing partnership "came about in a very Buffalo way, in a conversation at a coffee shop" Buffalo Rising reported. "Ever since he left Artvoice to found new alt-weekly The Public, Geoff Kelly wanted to create a sister press for publishing books. At the same time Foundlings, which evolved from poetry publication Foundlings Magazine had been looking for partnerships for nonfiction publication."

On behalf of Foundlings, Ryan has participated as a panelist on issues related to publishing, including Just Buffalo's "Lit Mag Roundtable" in 2018 and Arts Services Initiative of Western New York's Creative Professionals Exchange in 2019.

Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford

Also in 2018 Foundlings Press released Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford, a multigenre collection of work dealing with the legacy of the poet Frank Stanford. Ryan edited the work along with Foundlings co-founder Max Crinnin. Its over 30 contributors included well-known poets such as Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limon, Adam Clay, and Noah Falck, as well as academics, translators, and rising MFA and PhD candidates. The Times Literary Supplement described the book:

"Constant Stranger collects “tributes” and dedicatory poems by Wright, Ralph Adamo, Forrest Gander, Ada Limón and others; recollections; literary-critical studies; a handful of poems translated into Spanish; and “after Frank Stanford”, twenty-one poems by mostly young poets clearly both intrigued and troubled by Stanford’s unsettling legacy. Some of the most compelling pieces in the volume scratch at or, in the case of Ginny Crouch Stanford’s spellbinding prose poem “Requiem”, explode the myth of this “swamprat Rimbaud” (as Lorenzo Thomas called him) without diminishing the pull of his poetic imagination or the lure of his storytelling powers. Others demonstrate how the striking imagery, forceful rhythms and complex allusiveness of his best poems transcend any pigeonholing of his work as Southern regionalism. Two critical essays tackle the multiple registers and stream-of-consciousness structure of The Battlefield, a work that one admirer opined might be “our Ulysses”."

The review concluded, "The diverse voices assembled in Constant Stranger suggest the time is right for common readers to discover this "poet’s poet.""

The poet Jack Christian reviewed the book for Rain Taxi Review, saying "Constant Stranger offers readers a place to explore and to problematize the wholly unique effects of his poems, and to grapple with the charismatic but flawed poet behind them."

Other publishing ventures

Ryan also organized and served as managing editor for the first collection of poetry exclusively from young Buffalo writers, My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry (Blazevox, 2017). The title came from a poem of the same name by contributor Janet McNally. In a blurb on the book, the poet and essayist Hanif Aburraqib said, "My Next Heart is a journey through a city the way it should be: many hands, many images, many cars with many windows down. ... All of the work inside of this anthology sings to a different corner of the place where it was born. Even the work that isn’t about Buffalo sings to a very particular emotional interior that builds its own, new home. You will love this anthology if you love a place you were born, or born again. You will love this anthology if you close your eyes from somewhere you are and dream of somewhere you want to be. There are many ways to see yourself in this bounty of lovely, furious, heartfelt, high stakes writing."

In an interview in Buffalo Spree, Ryan described his motivations for undertaking the project: "There was just so much going on in the scene, with young people especially, that we needed to try to take a snapshot. I knew that I was totally the wrong person for the job, and I immediately thought of Justin [Karcher] and Noah [Falck]—because of their poetry, and because of the role they’ve played in the community for several years now."

In 2019 Ryan partnered with the writer Matthew Bookin to coedit an anthology of writing from Buffalo-based authors for Doestoevsky Wannabe Press, part of its "Cities" anthology series, forthcoming in 2020

Essays and criticism

As an essayist, critic, and journalist, Ryan has published with CNN , The Buffalo News, and other publications. Ryan has also published interviews with authors George Saunders for The White Review, Karl Ove Knausgaard for Traffic East, and Noah Falck for Rain Taxi. In 2019, he authored an essay, "Dellas: A Conversation in Progress," on the photographer Mark Dellas, published by the Burchfield Penney Art Center online and in a gallery book celebrating Dellas' exhibition People and Places.

Music writing

Ryan is a regular music critic for The Skinny.. Notable publications have included interviews with the Scottish musician and songwriter C Duncan and the Russian theraminist Lydia Kavina; and coverage of festivals T in the Park 2015, Positivus 2015, and SxSW 2016, which included an interview with the band CHVRCHES. Ryan has also published longer essays with The Skinny, including a critical meditation on Kendrick Lamar's album DAMN. and a memoir about his experience as an American relocating to Edinburgh

Aidan Ryan

This article "Aidan Ryan (poet)" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Aidan Ryan (poet). Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

---