Interview with Ross Gay, Author of "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude"

We are absolutely delighted to present our interview with Ross Gay! Ross Gay is the author of three books: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), and Against Which (2006). He is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook “Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens,” in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, “River.” He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, and he is an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Just today, Gay's book, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, was selected as a finalist for the National Book Awards. We wish him a hearty congratulations, and hope you enjoy our interview:

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If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?

I have no idea—probably I’d be some of the other things I am, and maybe I’d do them a little bit more or differently. I bet I’d be a teacher in some way, that feels very likely—that’s one of the family businesses, on both Mom’s and Dad’s sides, we come from teachers. I’ve inherited that kinda hard. For instance, sometimes I’ll teach kettlebell classes, like an 8-week class at a Crossfit studio or something. I love that. I LOVE it. And I love the idea of having a job where I’m standing up a lot, walking around, swinging a big dumb ball of steel. Or I might dig in more (ha!) to the orcharding gardening thing. Maybe I’d have a gardening business, or maybe I would’ve studied botany in some official way, or maybe I’d have a nursery and travel the world looking for different kinds of figs and smuggle them all into my big weird greenhouse, wherever that’d be. Or maybe I’d become the serviceberry man. I love dance though too, so maybe I’d have figured out a way to dance more, or singing, you know? Singing is fun! Might not make a living from it, but shoot, maybe I’ll be a singer! I thought I wanted to be a football player when I was a kid, and even tried to pursue that career option a bit after playing college ball, and then decided, ah, fuck it, let me do this poetry thing, it seems fun. Maybe I’d be coaching basketball, which I did for about ten years, and adored, and plan on getting back into soon. I also like writing in other genres though too, so maybe I’d write more non-fiction, or maybe I’d write a novel…maybe I’ll write a novel! That’ll be a mess. Oh what else. I like bookmaking a lot. I like printing, like letterpress stuff, and love these shops that have popped up doing letterpress work. You know, I love being in an art studio, a place where things are being made. I want to make my own classrooms more like that. Maybe I would’ve hunkered down into that. I also love architecture, and building stuff, and design, and all that. Probably nothing particularly mechanical, certainly not automotive, because I just can’t even pretend to give a shit about a car. Unless it’s a really pretty color. As long as it was a job that entailed hollering about what I love in some way.

How did you begin to write, and what drew you to writing?

I don’t actually know the answer to this. I certainly wasn’t a reader of much besides comic books as a kid—the X-Men, Avengers, Hulk, all those. I didn’t mess with DC at all, like at all. My brother was a DC guy, loved the Flash especially, I remember getting him an old Flash comic one Christmas for 5 bucks, which felt was a big expenditure, but I got myself a beautiful mini Steve Caballero skateboard for like 45 bucks, which my folks indicated with scowls and probably some huffing and yelling and shrugs with arms up and all that and maybe a little grounding that my holiday choices demonstrated not only my selfishness but my general shittiness. I was like, “He loves the Flash! What?!” That said, my total super favorite comic was Powerman and Iron Fist, the unlikely duo of Luke Cage (Powerman) and this white dude who was kind of a ninja and maybe didn’t have a name other than Iron Fist. I was so excited to see this black superhero (Powerman) and he remains the only comic book character who I actually love. I really really like the Hulk and a few others. Oh I really like Iron Fist, he wore this awesome green outfit. She Hulk was awesome. But Powerman I loved. I love.

Oh, your question. Umm, I wrote a few little love poems to people, and I would write treatises time to time, like when I got in-school suspension for cutting class and hacky-sacking, then running away when the hall aide (Mrs. Weldy) busted me. I wrote something about how stupid in-school suspension is. It was more articulate than that sentence I think. Started writing poems etc in earnest in college.

When you write, how do you balance your agenda toward yourself and toward the audience?

I’m writing first to address or enter some questions I have; that’s my first agenda. The first reason I’m writing the poem. It’s one of the ways I think deeply and rigorously. My second agenda is to figure out how to craft a thing that makes that process useful and interesting and maybe pleasurable to someone other than myself. They overlap and elbow each other, for sure, in ways I can’t actually and honestly articulate, but I do know in truth that the first thing is my question. The second thing is the public poem. The desire to deeply pursue the personal question, though, may be motivated or at least nudged forward by the desire to write the public poem, though. So it’s murky!

When someone criticizes your work, when do you know to take their advice, and when do you know that your justification for adding that simile or using that line break overrides that critique?

Oh, you know, I have a handful of very good readers whose eyes and hearts I trust, who know what I’m up to (often more than I do). Those are the folks I look to for help with my poems, and I depend on them. Like actually depend, need, you know. But then when someone not those people criticizes the work, I suppose if it feels like it’s coming from a reasonable voice, and if it’s saying something useful, I try to listen.

On Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude: with just the title, I’m drawn to ask. What do we take for granted in our lives?

A: I don’t know what you take for granted. I take for granted most delightful things in my life, which one could start cataloging when waking up—like waking up (if you’re into that), like feeling your blanket and your sheets (if you’re lucky enough to have them, blankets, sheets, the sense of touch), like one’s feet on the ground (if you’re lucky enough to have those things), etc. Oh! Like dreaming that you took a big long piss and waking up to find you didn’t pee in the bed. How about that? It could go on like this, don’t you think? Wouldn’t it be insane to go through the day acknowledging every wonderful thing, like the person who actually didn’t lose control of his car while I was riding my bike down the road, and the next person, and the next, and the next. Or the person who grew the wheat that goes into the bread on the sandwich I’ll eat. Or the person who grew the lentils. Or the people (they were actually people who made decisions, you know?) who decided to keep growing lentils, so that they remain a seed, a food, that we can enjoy. Or the variety of apple I am going to eat after lunch. Or figured out how to make soap, which I will use in my shower. Or how to make a water treatment system. Or to grow coffee. Or my mother, holy shit, my mother. How many millions of things did she do for me. Not lots—it’s actually probably billions of things, actually. Literally. Literally actually. And my dad. Literally actually. Thankful the trend among teenagers to say “literally” about most everything will pass. Thankful for teenagers. That’s me this second not even getting started. It’s insane, isn’t it? And ten zillion times more insane not to. For me. Yeah, I don’t know what you take for granted in your life. But I think it’s a good question. And then a good practice to start thanking those things. For me I mean. It makes me happier.

Your voice is a mixture of a conversational tone and hard-hitting, beautifully crafted images. How did you develop this voice? Are you attempting to engage with the audience, to play with them, with this voice?

Not exactly sure, to be honest. Probably just by writing thousands of horrible poems and finding time to time things that are interesting in them, maybe. Things that land with me. It’s funny, though, thinking about your question: often it seems to me that the hardest hitting moments in this most recent book are the ones where the intensely crafted language drops out and the speaker just says a thing really plainly. As though the truth cannot be properly conveyed with the beautiful alone—and then, if the common spoken thing conveys a truth, it becomes a kind of beauty as well.

I am interested, for sure, in dynamics—I think a lot about that in very basic ways, in the variations in a poem, the fast and the slow, the long and the short, the beautiful and the plain. How do those things interact or rub against each other to make meaning. How do they, interacting with their “opposites”, become more what they are? I had a painting teacher once named Barney who saw that I had like three moments of red in a painting and he said, “Just so you know, if you have just one moment of red, that red will be more red.” We could argue about this, but one way or another it’s a good question, even though he said it as a statement.

How has your poetry changed over time?

I think the biggest change, from my perspective—and I actually just thought of this the other day, walking down the street—is my now sort of uncomplicated commitment to exalting the beautiful. It’s my commitment to reverence. I think my first couple books were clearly also committed to those things, but maybe from another angle—reverence with justice as the first step, or reverence as secondary to a pursuit of justice, which some of those poems maybe argue is the true thing to be revered. And justice is the true thing to be revered, but so is beauty, so is what you adore, what you love—in fact I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, our working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, often, it seems. I should say it’s harder for me, and so part of my practice, and my poetry is part of my practice, is to shout what is to be adored and preserved and loved. Other things have changed too, but less fundamental things, I think. You know, I’m writing longer poems now. Chattier.

Did and does your biracial upbringing create conflict within your poetry?

I don’t quite know what that means, “create conflict”. I think one’s upbringing, one’s subject position, occasions one’s poetry, whether or not we acknowledge it as such. So, you know, the whitest-straightest-maleist subject position, which in America has often been imagined as a kind of invisibility by virtue of its being imagined as universal (true) (imagined by those whitest-straightest-maleist, by the way, who “owned” the land and the printing presses and sometimes the people) is also a subject position. So you know, I’m saying of course my upbringing has informed my poems. I’m also saying every subject position creates the conflict or energy or motion by which we make poems, or walk through the world. So that w-s-m person’s w-s-m upbringing or w-s-m subject position creates conflict in their poems too. You get me? A poem by w-s-m is full of conflict that has everything to do with w-s-m, though it’s often just imagined or construed as a poem, just an experience, just EXPERIENCE. But you know, a James Wright poem is not just beautiful, breaking into blossom and all that is not just TRUE; it’s loaded with w-s-m struggle; it’s made of that struggle.

So kinda I’m saying I hope you ask the next w-s-m poet you interview that same question. (I’m saying that with love, not judgment or dickishness, by the way.)

Some poets write about experiences that aren't entirely their own. At worst, such an act disenfranchises marginalized voices, who are already struggling to be heard. At best, the poet conveys a genuine empathy for the voice they are embodying. What is the line between these two kinds of writing?

Seems to me it changes with each act, each attempt. The line, I mean. I know exactly what you mean, and I don’t know any rules for when it feels more like love or concern or when it feels more like violence. Though it’s a great question, and a necessary question.

What advice do you have for our predominantly young readership base?

I don’t have any advice. Oh, wait. Try to be kind and love wildly. Maybe we all try and do that together.

#interview #rossgay