Q&A
PHOTO COURTESY: NATASHA KOMADA
Sunflowers and Superheroes An interview with Ross Gay, poet, gardener and former comic book collector. BY KYNDALL FLOWERS
How did you first get into writing? I think I wrote little poems and things before I started thinking of writing, but I became sort of serious about reading and writing after being introduced by a teacher in college to Amiri Baraka’s poems. I can tell an artistic community is important to you. How would you create or find one? It’s interesting, you know, from where I went to college I have two or three people who are still making art, and there’s no real calculus for how that happens. Except, maybe the fact that we were dissatisfied with what was available to us. And then in graduate school I became close with some other people, not around what we were dissatisfied with, but around what we fundamentally loved which was poems. But that’s
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not entirely true. One of my best friends, and part of my poetic community, Patrick Rosal, we didn’t even talk about poetry at first when we became friends. We just played basketball. It was years later that we started talking about each others poems. So that’s a long way of saying that I don’t know. But it’s utterly true that it’s crucial to have a kind of community that sees you and values you. You went to college for football, and play basketball today. What affect do
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Ross Gay in the Bloomington Community Orchard. The Orchard works to provide fresh produce to community members.
sports have on your life? You know it’s hard exactly to say, but I can sort of talk about what other people have said. Speculate a little bit. One of my friends Simone White, beautiful poet, writer, has talked to me about training, and sport as a kind of training. It’s a kind of discipline and, you know, one of the things about making art is that it is a discipline. Partly, it just requires you to sit down and do it. She brought to my attention that if you can run a lot of miles, it’s kind of like sitting or a long time with a poem, with language or a line. It’s the same thing, because we want to do something else. It can be uncomfortable. What kind of poems are easier for you to write? Bad poems. Really good poems
