About Kathryn Ridall

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, then spent many years as a psychotherapist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Later in life, the beguiling luminous muse of poetry paid me an unexpected visit. As is her way, the muse turned my life upside down. Priorities and passions shifted as she called to me. In 2010, I moved to Eugene, Oregon to devote myself to poetry.

My interest in the muse has many roots. As a psychotherapist, I watched unexpected creative urges arise in my clients as they worked through painful conditioning. Encouraging clients to listen to their instincts and creative urges became my favorite part of psychotherapy.

In my own life, I have had several visits from the muse―in psychology, spirituality and in personal relationships. When the muse of poetry burst into my life, I was already a devotee of the muse in her many forms.

OLD WOMAN, YOUNG POET

I was old when poetry swept me up,
the same age Emily Dickinson died.

I see Emily and me, fifty-six
each of us, brushing elbows

as we pass one another by—
her spirit, quieted and complete,

slides down into the cool silences
of the earth while mine rises

with sudden heat, blossoms
with the words she is leaving behind.

Others reborn late might say,
What a miracle. Life arrives

with such surprises in her basket,
and this may be so

but what of the lost days—
months and years

when the clay of my dreaming self
lay inert and unshaped,

when I knew nothing
of line breaks that pry open

the long heaviness of prose,
allow a soul to finally sing