Sunflowers and Superheroes

Ross Gay in the Bloomington Community Orchard. The Orchard works to provide fresh produce to community members. PHOTO COURTESY: NATASHA KOMADA

An interview with Ross Gay, poet, gardener and former comic book collector.

Ross Gay is a poet from Youngstown, Ohio. Gay has published three books: Against Which, Bringing The Shovel Down, and Catalog Of Unabashed Gratitude. Catalog won the 2015 National Book Critics Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and the Ohioana Book Award. Catalog Of Unabashed Gratitude is nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Ross is also a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free fruit and community garden oriented project.

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 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 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 are hard to write, and they’re hard for me to write right now. That’s what I’m trying to write. Poems that I don’t know how to write. Yea, I’m really interested in poems I don’t know how to write.

Is there a way for you to get into that “hard poetry” mindset?

Good question. I don’t know. I’m always trying to write poems I don’t know how to write. I’m always trying to write poems that will teach me something fundamental about my life, or about life. So mostly when I get into my writing, it’s always about that. If I’m going to write a poem I’m in that space.

Gardening is huge part of your life. What’s your favorite flower?

I love sunflowers. But I also love zinnias. I mainly grow food, but okra, which is related to hibiscus, has a beautiful flower. I also love peach tree flowers, peach blossoms. They’re so delicate and beautiful. I love apple blossoms. They’re unbelievable. I’ve been growing for a long time. I love a lot of flowers.

Your first two books seem to be in a dark area, and your third one is all about gratitude. What was the process, the shift that happened?

It's interesting. The first book is had the first poems I wrote that I felt were good enough to be in a book. There’s a couple of celebratory poems, that are more, I don’t even know how to say it. The second book is a really interesting book to me, and I feel like in that book you can see a kind of transformation where in the beginning of that book it’s just in a state of critique, and its really trying to engage in what it means to live in the culture that we live in. The country that we live in. It’s also trying to imagine a way out of that. By the end of that book I feel like there’s a kind of ethical transformation of the speaker or the imagination, or the imaginative horizons that are available to me as a writer, ideally to a reader. What arrives at the end of that book makes it possible for the third book to happen. The first two books were necessary for me to get to that third, and I’m glad that I was able to arrive at that third book. I always say it’s about that kind of adult joy, and when I say adult joy I mean how you manage to keep it above water, despite the fact of our lives, which is that it’s a struggle.

Do you have any specific practices that you use to take care of yourself? To keep it “above water”?

I like tea. I like to sleep enough, and I exercise. And I have good friendships, good relationships. I take care of those.

What do you think poetry’s place is in activism right now?YI can’t speak to that in a big general way, but I feel like poems always seem to be part of political movements. Always. Like poetry, whatever the point of the poetry is, it seems like it’s always part of the movement, which is to say it’s a necessary part of activism. And I assume it’s a necessary part of activism now, just like it was thirty years ago, and a hundred years ago. People use poems! They use them for activism, they use them for weddings, they use them for funerals. I was just at a funeral last night and on the inside of the [program], there was a poem. That’s what we do. When people say shit like, oh no, poetry its… First of all, it’s fundamentally not true that there are any problems with poetry. But it’s like, anytime you go to a wedding, anytime you go somewhere life. You go to a march, you go to a rally, poems are part of it. It’s crucial to have a community that sees you and values you.

What did you read as a young poet?

So, I didn’t start reading until I was in college. I read comic books as a kid. You know like Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, and then Sylvia Plath, you know? I remember reading this Mark Strand book, like his selected poems. I read everything! When I started writing more seriously, my sophomore, junior year in college, I was just constantly reading… I didn’t read everything! That’s bullshit. That’s completely bullshit! I read very contemporary poetry. That’s what I was interested in. And I wanted to read poems by people of color. What was your favorite comic? Iron Man and Iron Fist. You know Luke Cage? Yea. So if there was like a black superhero, I was like “I need that”. I had every one except three. They had a 100 or 120 comic run. But you know, my parents threw them away. They threw them away at college! My brother had a bunch of comics too. It hurts! God, I’d love to have those around.

What were your favorite parts about those heros?

Power Man, I loved how he was a Black guy. I also loved that he was like a badass but he wasn’t. He had skin that was like steel. So it was like, that’s tough, but I’m not into those DC Comics with people who are almost entirely invincible. Luke Cage, he was tough but he wasn’t invincible by any stretch of the imagination. You know, I used to read this thing called Marvel Universe, and it had stats of all the comic book characters, of all the heros. So you could find out what Luke Cage bench pressed, you could find out how fast he ran a hundred yard dash. He had a good bench, but it wasn’t crazy. He was superhuman but he wasn’t like, super super human. He was just very tough and he had a good Q&A outfit. He had a headband a butterfly collar, the tights. He looked good! He looked really good. He was fly as hell.

What has been your favorite imperfect, perfect moment? Something you’ve done or seen?

There’s this marching band that I saw years ago, but they were pretty new the first time I saw them. I don’t know how long they’d been together but they were pretty new and they had like, acrobats and stilts and all this fire. I saw them two years in a row. The first year it looked like, “Oh, someone might get hurt.” Like, “someone might get their face burned off.” It was intense! And they were great. The second time they seemed perfect. So much less interesting. I’m actually way less interested in things that are represented as masterism. I’m not very interested in mastery. I’m really interested in things that strain at an individual or group’s capacity and ability, such that mastery itself is only the willingness to obliterate one’s own mastery. So if you see footage of John Coltrane, to watch him and Elvin Jones do their thing… Talk about a master, like, there’s no doubt about it. It’s plain and simple. He could play a beautiful song but that wasn’t what he was doing! He was far beyond that. That’s partly what’s really beautiful about Kamasi Washington. From the little bit that I’ve gotten to watch online and stuff, it’s not just being great that he’s trying to do. He’s trying to tear something new open. Erykah Badu, too. I love Erykah Badu. She’s so good, but there’s something to her. Her pursuit is not just beauty. It’s something bigger. We’re so lucky to have so many good artists around.

What do you think ties together musicians and poets and artists and photographers?

We’re all makers. We’re all sort of folks who are constructing a kind of vision and that’s significant. Thats a real thing.

What would you tell a youth poet right now?

Let what you love be your engine.