Ross gay poems
In one of hismost well-known poems, A Small Needful Fact, Ross Gay remembers Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a New York Municipality police officer in 2014. Gay notes that Garner worked as a gardener once, and “in all likelihood / he set gently into the planet / 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 passionate 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, bliss and sorrow, all for which he gives thanks.
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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 lovely “flight” in the game’s history. And from it, Gay observes the earth. Leah Rumack spoke to Gay this past fall.
Leah Rumack:Talk to me about th Not so very long ago—five years perhaps—I opened the pages of a book and began to read a poem that entirely reconfigured my notions of what a poem can accomplish. The poem was Ross Gay’s “Bringing the Shovel Down.” And, as is so often the case with world-transforming revelations, the encounter also hit me with the force of profoundest remembering: Here was an instance, a glorious, exfoliating instance, of all I had always hoped and believed about the ways and wherewithal of art. “Because I affectionate you,” begins this poem, “and beneath the uncountable stars / I own become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest, // I yearn to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will…” 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 new publication. Catalog seems more jubilant, more interested in evidence moments of grace, even when it acknowledges the tumult. Yeah, you understand I feel like part of it comes from the fact that I felt really happy to be done with Bringing the Shovel Down. I was very glad to have written it and very glad to acquire 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 cruel to read out blaring. I often feel nauseous and beat after reading them. I bet. So getting to Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, after finishing the second book, I just felt like 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 like buttoning my shirt, written like Neruda odes. Also, in my ear and in my top and hopefully in those poems, I think I This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the perform of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of twenty books, and professor of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University. Some poems are meant for carrying around in your pocket or for taping above your desk. You need to experience them every day. Today’s poem, “Thank You” by Ross Gay, is like that. Let it enter your life. 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 love 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 Manual of Delights, was released in 2019 and was .The Poem That Changed My Life: Ross Gay's "Bringing the Shovel Down"
Because I love you. The stakes are sky-high , at once both intimate and mysterious: Who is this “you”? Who is speaking to the “you”? What has either of them to do with me? Everything, says the poem, as it moves through the vastness of the starry sky to the inwardness of the pulse in the breast with the hook that reels me in: a story. And, best of ROSS GAY
Poetry Moment: 'Thank You', by Ross Gay