Ross gay hält
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After well-deserved accolades, Ross Gay approaches the lectern at Cave Canem July 9, in Brooklyn. But before even greeting us, he looks down, saying “I’m going to void my pockets&#;” which he then proceeds to execute. It’s a throw-away remark, but one that tells everything about Gay, who gives so fully, applications us dear readers everything from the lint to the coin—holds to the light every memory and dream space, each quotidian gesture, the smallest weeds of this breathing society. This is a poet of deep generosity, for whom every fig trunk is a communion table.
Ross Gay is in Novel York to read from his new book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, ), a collection of odes and long poems that are sprawling and raucous and gorgeous, with change after associative turn. It is the night before his reading and a few dozen of us are gathered to perceive the poet speak on the role of seeing in the visual and literary arts and its connection with the imagination. A broad topic, for sure, but the very title, “Fall No More,” invites curiosity.
It’s clear from the start that this will be more meditation than lecture, as Same-sex attracted struggles to even frame t
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 88 pages. $
Note: After this book review was assigned and completed, Ross Gay joined the Kenyon Review as an Editor at Large.
Ross Gay’s book-length poem Be Holding, like its focal subject—the legendary shot in the NBA finals by Julius Erving, aka “Dr. J”—is a gravity-defying feat. In turning an instance of athletic prowess and grace into an expansive metaphoric vision, Gay pulls off a syntactical tour de force and—except for a a halting mid-poem intake of breath—delivers most of the poem as one long-sustained sentence. While his two-line stanzas fall fluidly down the page, the poem’s tone is buoyant, refusing closure, even omitting a final period at poem’s end. In a flashback Gay imagines his subject as a youth in Long Island:
what I’m telling you
about Erving’s soaringwhich is less is astronauticality,
and more the cast of the youngErving’s eyes, which are looking, somehow,
far past the metal backboardsor the rim he would, imminently,
rock the rust from, looking farpast the chain link
wrapping the courts and past the high-riseapartments and past the elevator tracks
of the Metro North he rode to earn hThank God we have Mann's sweet humor to maintain us rooted when we talk about bodies and the gym.
Although he does not define himself as queer in any way (as far as I can tell), African-American Ross Gay deals with the same material. But also raises the bar, offering an unforced transcendent moment in his sonnet "Poem Beginning with a Line Overheard at the Gym" from his book "Against Which."
In its entirety, here's the poem:
I'd drive a thousand miles to suck the dick
of the gentleman who fucked her you're like
me, the pristine lilt of iambic verse will halt
your dumb work on the bench press. You also love
the hyperbolic rattling of logic's cage.
Mostly, you love the way the loins fuel
the tongue's conjure. But what grand sadness dragged
in misplaced desire; as though from another's memory
of smoke we might glean some end
of ache. Revelation be told, ache's shop is long
set up. Is birth's phantom. Let's, instead admire
the tether. Its
wrangle with the loamy earth for the body,
the keepsake.
If you want to make a great poem, any subject matter has potential pitfalls, especially if it's as potentially insignificant as going to the gym. Not only does Gay dare to use that content, but he als.