Ross gay poetry
Poetry Moment: 'Thank You', by Ross Gay
This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and composer Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of twenty books, and professor of English and creative writing at the Bar Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Some poems are meant for carrying around in your pocket or for taping above your desk. You need to exposure them every morning. Today’s poem, “Thank You” by Ross Gay, is love that. Let it enter your being. Its images and insights remind us to inhabit this moment, this now.
Ross Gay grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, playing football and basketball, and later attended Lafayette College, where he played football and discovered his affectionate for poetry. He’s the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, which won the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Tumbling through the city in my mind without once looking up the racket in the lugwork probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said or did some crime or other the metropolis they say is a lonely place until yes the sound of sweeping and a woman yes with a broom beneath which you are now too the canopy of a fig its arms pulling the September sun to it and she has a hose too and so works hard rinsing and scrubbing the walk lest some poor sod slip on the silk of a fig and break his hip and not probably reach over to gobble up the perpetrator the glow catches the veins in her hands when I ask about the tree they flutter in the air and she says take as much as you can help me so I load my pockets and mouth and she points to the step-ladder against the wall to mean more but I was without a sack so my meager plunder would have to suffice and an old woman whom gravity was pulling into the earth loosed one from a low slung branch and its eye wept appreciate hers which she dabbed with a kerchief as she cleaved the fig with what remained of her teeth and soon there were eight or nine people gathered beneath the tree looking int If writers write about what puzzles them, Ross Lgbtq+ is puzzled by happiness. His oeuvre is a gorgeous, open-hearted, lyrical response to that puzzlement. Happiness, by the way, that’s always in the context of suffering, in the context of pain. His style is a courteous of restless exuberant unfolding, a thinking and feeling that feels like it’s happening as you interpret it, like an ice cube melting on a stovetop. You can catch it in his debut collection, Bringing the Shovel Down, which comes with an epigraph from Audre Lorde, all the way through his most recent book-length poem on and around and about the late great Dr. J, who conducted on basketball courts around the region “his extended course of study / on seriousness and grace, / which has so enthralled the throngs.” That book is called Be Holding, probably the best long poem on sports since Kenneth Koch’s Ko, or a Season on Earth. Many people are familiar with Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. That book of poems, published in 2015, includes such wonders as “Feet”: Friends, mine are gross feet: I think we can start by talking about how Bringing the Shovel Down maybe had a wider lens and was more overtly political compared to the fresh book. Catalog seems more jubilant, more interested in conclusion moments of grace, even when it acknowledges the tumult. Yeah, you realize I feel prefer part of it comes from the fact that I felt really content to be done with Bringing the Shovel Down. I was very pleased to have written it and very glad to own wrapped it up. There is an intense sort of brutality that sort of weaves through that book. It followed an arc, tracked a transformation through self-interrogation, into looking at one’s self and others with more loving, compassionate eyes. Some of those poems are brutal to read out raucous. I often notice nauseous and hit after reading them. I bet. So getting to Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, after finishing the second book, I just felt prefer I wanted to write about stuff that I adore. And I was totally reading Neruda’s odes. Yeah, the book is filled with odes. Exactly, exactly. Those poems written to things favor buttoning my shirt, written like Neruda odes. Also, in my ear and in my leader and hopefully in those poems, I think I na In one of hismost legendary poems, A Small Needful Fact, Ross Gay remembers Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York Capital police officer in 2014. Gay notes that Garner worked as a gardener once, and “in all likelihood / he set gently into the ground / some plants which most likely / … continue to grow.” It’s a powerful poem, distributed widely on social media, in which the poet accesses a deep sentimental landscape through specific observations. He witnesses. Gay, who teaches at Indiana University, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize for his 2015 Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. In the title poem, he meditates on loss, happiness and sorrow, all for which he gives thanks. His latest collection, Be Holding, published in September, is ostensibly a book about basketball Hall of Famer Julius Erving (a.k.a. Dr. J). More specifically, it’s about 20 seconds in Dr. J’s career: a hop shot considered by aficionados as the most pretty “flight” in the game’s history. And from it, Gay observes the nature. Leah Rumack spoke to Gay this past fall. Leah Rumack:Talk to me about th
the body’s frequent wreckage
stuffed into boots. The second toe
on the left foot’s crooked
enough that when a child
asks what’s that? of it,
ROSS GAY
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