Dennis Ryan Biography

Dennis Joseph Ryan is a former university English professor having worked at universities in Japan (Tokai University, Shonan and Sapporo Campus) and the United States, and at a high school in Freeport, Bahamas when he first began teaching in 1976. He speaks Japanese, and sometimes Japanese words and Chinese characters enter into his poems. He began publishing poems while in graduate school in the mid-1970's, and most of those poems appeared in The Alfred Review and the journal Poem. He is married to Kim Jung Sook of Puel Ri, South Korea, and is the father of two sons Devin and Shawn. He took a hiatus from writing poems at about the time of his marriage in Seoul, South Korea in December of 1981, and returned to writing poems in the late 1990's and has not stopped writing them since that time. He and his wife live in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he worked as an English lecturer in the English Department at North Carolina State University. Prior to his appointment at North Carolina State University, he served as Head of the Japanese Department at Buena Vista University In Storm Lake, Iowa, where he also chaired the Freshman Composition Committee, and taught Greek and Latin Literatures including The Iliad, The Aeneid, and the poetry of Sappho, Archilochus, Catullus, and courses in the novel, selected authors including Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolf and Albert Camus.

Dr. Ryan presently serves as a editor/copyeditor of book manuscripts for the University Of California, Berkley, where he has worked with Dr. Yoko Hasegawa, Chair of The Department of East Asian Languages, on her manuscript which, after three years of editing, was published as JAPANESE: A LINGUISTIC INTRODUCTION (Cambridge University Press,2014) . He is also a book reviewer for the Linguistic Society Of America (LSA) and its flagship journal LANGUAGE, where he has reviewed such notable books as Yoko Hasegawa's SOLILOQUY IN JAPANESE AND ENGLISH (John Benjamins,2010) , Roumyana Slabakova's MEANING IN THE THE SECOND LANGUAGE (Mouton de Gruyter,2008) , Stein Braten's THE INTERSUBJECTIVE MIRROR IN INFANT LEARNING AND EVOLUTION OF SPEECH (John Benjamin's,2009) and Roy Harris's RATIONALITY AND THE LITERATE MIND (Routledge,2009) .

During the years he served as a graduate English instructor and teaching professor (1986-2002) , Dr. Ryan was an associate of Dr. James L. Kinneavy, Director Of The Writing Program at The University of Texas, Austin and author of A Theory Of Discourse, a foundational text in the emerging field of Writing Studies/Composition And Rhetoric. The two worked together, and presented papers together several times on panels on writing theory/pragmatics and the ethics of writing at College Conferences on Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Atlanta, Phoenix and Toronto.

Dr. Ryan has also published academic articles, book reviews, book review essays and academic notes on American Modernist writers—e.g. Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, George Oppen—and American Poets (e.g. William Bronk) published by Cambridge University Press, MIT University Press, The University of Idaho Press, PMLA, ERIC, etc. He has also presented papers at major conferences—including meetings of the MLA and SAMLA—in Applied Linguistics and Modernist American And British Writers (T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and William Butler Yeats) in Japan, France and the United States.

Lately, some fifty (50) of his poems have appeared in four issues (#45, #46, #47 and #52 where he is the featured poet) of TALISMAN: A JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND POETICS edited by Edward Foster. He has acknowledged as influences Shakespeare's sonnets and the work of American poets Robinson Jeffers, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, George Oppen and William Bronk, the latter two poets whom he knew, William Bronk serving as a poetry mentor in letters exchanged between the two poets from 1979 until Bronk's death in 1999. Dennis Ryan's poems often focus on the reader, addressing the reader directly in the poems, on apostrophe, on trying to explain the poems of other poets, and one of his favorite poetic devices is soliloquy because in soliloquy the speaker allows him or herself the freedom to speak the truth since no one else is there to hear it. He has written some 75 soliloquy on a number of subjects, perhaps as many as 40-50 soliloquys hon Shakespeare's Hamlet, the speakers of these soliloquys being Hamlet, Ophelia, Horatio and other members of the Danish court. Almost all of these soliloquys from Hamlet are spoken in dialog between the characters, especially those involving Hamlet and Ophelia, and concern subjects that have gone unspoken about in the play itself. Recently, he has written soliloquys featuring the poets Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery as the speakers.

He prefers writing occasional poems about particular experiences, but sometimes writes groups of poems in a series, such as the group poems " Ten Poem Installation..." , " Five Poems: Love and Intimacy in America 2005" and " Empathy and Abstraction... " In sum, he sees a number of his poems being in dialog with each other. He also writes poems in pairs, for example paired poems after watching films such as the Japanese film " Blue" and the French film " La Vie Reves de Anges" . Most of his poems are psychological in nature, involve relation and relationships, and he is particularly interested in " the psychology of art" and relationships between art/arts (e.g. painting, sculpture, music) life and poetry, most specifically the act of writing poems. He believes that poems, their meanings, only exist when the reader is thinking about them, reciting them, acting on what they say. The importance of poetry and the other arts is that people experience them, think about them, act on them. Certain art works, paintings, sculptures, music, poems leave residues, become a part of memory, and this is the true power and importance of the arts. The art work itself, the poem, the painting, the sculpture, etc., is the vehicle utilized to achieve this goal as " Art in the end" , he says, " is personal statement that connects me to you, and, hopefully, facilitates dialog between us."