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6/24/2008 [ interview ]
Antidote to Distraction: An Interview with Ross Gay
by Josephine Yu
Thomas Lux exclaims, “What a hammer, what a velvet wrecking ball, what a rip tooth saw Against Which is!” and Toni Derricotte says, “It makes me think of poetry in an entirely new way.” Ross Gay has earned this praise with poems that examine cruelties and losses, from the daily and private to the political and historical, but refuse to wallow in the misery of them. Ultimately, the poems of Against Which are poems of optimism, beauty, and joy, of which Gerald Stern writes, “Such love and intelligence, such self-effacement, such wisdom of form and language is seldom found anywhere in our poetry.” You can hear Ross Gay read at From the Fishouse: An Audio Archive of Emerging Poets.
In the following interview, conducted online in April 2008, Gay discusses optimism and violence, syntax and sound, Milton and basketball, and the pleasures and purpose of poetry.
Q. One of the things that first struck me about your work was the earnestness, the deep and sincere feeling. As Gerald Stern notes, your writing is “almost without any irony.” Your poems are emotionally forthright; sometimes they even risk sentimentality, run right up to the edge of melodrama, in the interest of expressing something meaningful. When irony and cleverness are so popular in contemporary poetry, are your earnestness and exuberant emotion a conscious choice?
A. Well, yeah, it’s a choice. I’ll tell you first what the choice is for. I feel like there is this wonderful and bizarre and ramshackle world out there (and in here) and it makes little sense not to holler at it and moan and let it be known (God Forbid!!!) that is does, in fact, hurt to love a thing so deeply. And when it feels good, it feels real good.
I know that’s out of favor. I know so much contemporary poetry finds an awful lot of glee in putting on airs of not really giving a shit—except that’s wrong, because one doesn’t find glee in not giving a shit. I should say satisfaction. I think of these folks as sitting in a little room chuckling at each other’s jokes. You’d write it like this: “hrmff, hrmff, hrmff.”
As it happens, there are probably like fifteen colors of flower on the ground and in the trees where I’m living right now. And the birds do not shut up. And my good friend’s mom died unexpectedly a week ago. And my partner’s a new beekeeper, and goddamn if the bees won’t teach us all something about earnestness. Should I not take that seriously?
I appreciate irony, and a lot of my favorite poets employ it beautifully. Thomas Lux, who is one of the most important poets we have, for my money, is a powerful ironist. And in his irony, we’re always reminded of the loved world, the sacred world, and the sacred inhabitants of it. I think that’s true. His irony is fueled by wonder and love and hurt—not by dismissal, not by cynicism. The poem “Haitian Cadavers” is a perfect example. He has a bunch. I can think of a bunch of other poets whose work I admire who go to irony to get some good work done. None of them write especially clever poems, I don’t think.
Q. Is this style reflective of an ideal or attitude you hold?
A. Yeah. I feel like there’s something really serious in writing a poem that someone else is going to read. And if I get the chance to do that, I’m probably going to make it worth something. I fully understand that “worth” comes in a lot of shapes and sizes (it does in my own work). But I’m not going to toss something off. I’m not going to shoot for cleverness. Like I said, I imagine the act of writing a poem, and giving it to someone (which is what I’m working at), as being something sacred and precious. A gift to write a poem that someone else will read. So I can’t really get behind taking that opportunity and writing something that will make someone go “hrnff hrmff hrmff.”
Q. The title Against Which is a phrase repeated in “It Starts at Birth,” which catalogues the ways we try to fight against or just distract ourselves from “the thing behind / the sting of air and light”: a man collects the baby teeth of his departed children, an executioner applies an ex-lover’s perfume beneath the nose hole of his mask, with its gold-embroidered lining. What is “the thing behind / the sting of air and light”? The fact of our death? The difficulty of our living?
A. Yeah, that’s what it is. I think when I was writing this poem, which came from a conversation with my pal Norrie, I was thinking about the various ways we build our lives so as to deny our impending deaths. “The thing behind / the sting of air and light.” That executioner, man, he’s working hard at it. I was thinking personally, of course—what are the ways that I can be downright dumb and absent because I’m chasing this illusion? Some traditions call it Samsara. Some would call it wake up, Dummy! Seems like an interesting exercise—examining our decisions in this way. As a nation, too. What fear will make us do. I think the poem probably asks that question.
Q. Does poetry force us to consider these realities, or does it console and distract us with the dazzle of its gold embroidery—or does it somehow manage both?
A. Well, the poetry I turn to actually serves as some kind of guide for being in the world. It often is an articulation of something that was, for me, as yet inarticulable. Some deep, deep feeling that was there but that I couldn’t exactly state or name—and that I couldn’t, therefore, quite understand. Which is to say: poetry teaches me what I feel. It teaches me what I know.
Because I’m mostly concerned with certain realities, like, say, how we might love better, the poetry I turn to tends to circle around that kind of concern (which is pretty big, I know). For instance, I just was flipping through a Tim Siebles book called Hurdy Gurdy, and found the poem, “The Debt,” which ends, “what is the lesson of history, if not/that we owe each other more bread, more/friendship, fewer lies,/less cruelty.” You know what? That’s the kind of poem I consider a gift, that’s the kind of poem I want to read. The poetry I admire provides the same “lesson” as Siebles’s “history.” (And there are a couple million ways to get at it, that’s for sure.)
I think your question is really smart, because there’s always the concern that reading something might be proxy for doing something. The same way going to a “political movie” might substitute for activism. As though reading and admiring the Siebles poem is enough, even if I keep up my habit of kicking my dog and stealing bread from the food pantry.
I feel like the pleasure of poetry is that, when it is good (again, my formulation of “good” here), it’s an antidote to distraction. Hacks away distraction. Which is at least part of why I think people don’t often turn to it here except (almost always) during ceremonies (which is an argument for how poetry is still very significant to us): I think it requires that we settle down and consider the elemental questions of our lives (we automatically do this during weddings and funerals—not necessarily while driving to school, or going to the bank, or putting a sandwich together). There’s not a whole lot of encouragement in this culture for that kind of thoughtfulness. I think we’re encouraged to think about how we’re going to make more money, how we’re going to get an addition to our house, if Brittany Spears really is nuts, why Obama doesn’t always wear a flag pin, who’s going to win Survivor, or the NCAA Tournament (guilty!!!), etc. Good poetry makes me consider the world rather than escape it. It makes me get at the real thing, rather than the trillion other unreal things.
Mind you, I love a beautiful poem. I love a poem that makes me want to dance. A dazzling poem. As long as it has soul. You know, Milton. Dickinson.
Q. Against Which is full of violence—men hung and others barbequed, cancer and suicide, children throwing frogs or beating other children—but also tenderness and gratitude, an insistence on redemption and transformation. How does this acute awareness of both the brutality and goodness of the world lead to the idea of a heaven that is “pain inside and out. And love / as thick as ore”? Could you talk about the spiritual struggle and questioning that occurs in that poem, “The Heaven”?
A. Well, I think the poem must be trying to reconcile the idea that this very life, rough as it may be, senseless as it may be, is the one we have. I go back to that idea of facing the world—truly facing it. You used the word struggle, and maybe the poem depicts struggle, I’m not sure. Probably. I don’t know, I think of how easy it is to turn our backs on this world, how that’s one of the ways we respond to difficulty and disappointment. And pain. Maybe the poem is about the courage involved in facing that world. This world. I’d say that’s a spiritual struggle, yes.
Q. In “Man Tries to Commit Suicide with a Crossbow,” you show the reader the terrible image of an arrow skewering a man’s head like a kabob, and then coax the reader to see past the obvious horror and envision the potential magic, the transformation of arrow tip to “budding horn” as the man walks to the hospital. What do you want this transformation to signal?
A. Well, you know, I’m an optimist! Actually, I think the poem begs some ethical questions about co-opting or representing another’s pain, questions that I’m currently trying to ask of my own work. You know, this is an easy example, maybe, of beautifying the terrible. But that’s not quite what you’re asking. When my buddy Jay told me this story I really did think, somewhere in me, maybe that’s the thing that will help him recover. As it happens, the weirdness of the story made for a fantastically real poem. But what’s most fascinating to me, and beautiful, is that act at the end of the poem, where the guy actually decides to get help (no easy task when you have an arrow stuck in your head). I think I wanted the poem to honor his walking to the hospital. You know, staying in it.
Q. Is this a transformation in the man or in the observer—a shift in how we interpret what we witness?
A. As I think about it, I was writing this poem while I was living with one of my best friends who was struggling with a pretty bad case of Leukemia. Part of his treatment was this drug called Interfeuron, I think you spell it like that. Well, every day he had to inject himself, or I injected him, with this poison that kept him feeling like he had the flu. Many, many months of this for this guy, this young guy. I could never quite get over his bravery, his steadfastness. You know, he had to keep working as a cook to keep his benefits. He managed to finish his college degree and MFA despite having a fever and puking all the time. But the more I think about it, the more I see my buddy in the guy who walked to the emergency room despite the arrow that he put in his head. Sticking it out. I guess we’re all in this boat.
Q. One reviewer described you as “a fine manipulator of punctuation, often deferring certainty to take advantage of multiple possibilities of modification and completion”—occasionally omitting it altogether. Do you have a strategy or philosophy of punctuation and syntax? A model or inspiration?
A. I don’t know that I have a “philosophy,” though I have pretty specific strategies for specific poems. I tend to favor a volatile line, or an enjambed line. I like to see how far I can push line integrity—considering the lines as units, maybe even little poems of their own—while maintaining “the meaning” of the poem. I like to use lines as little contrary indicators, little flashing “not so easy!” signs, to ramp up a poem’s dissonance or complication. I also favor a pretty heavily stressed line, and so tend to fiddle a lot with syntax to achieve that. Punctuation fits into that. These things, naturally, follow subject matter (or determine subject matter, but truth be told, for me it’s most often the former). A poem that requires a certain amount of velocity probably will not have the same kind of wrenched syntax as a shorter, more ponderous thing. I love to study Milton’s syntax. The way the syntax in Samson Agonistes is utterly wrought, agonizing and contorted while he bemoans his blindness, and the way, as his blindness settles in on him, the syntax becomes fairly placid. All of this within about 12 or 14 blank verse lines. I also love Lucille Clifton’s syntax, which is so authoritative and unembellished, which conveys such profound knowledge. Heather McHugh is a good one. I love Tom Lux’s syntax too. He uses all those parentheticals which are sort of funny but they’re also a disturbing element to so many of the poems, by which I mean they interrupt the sentences, often pointing us off in other directions, so that when we return we have to re-gather ourselves. I love to give my students weird exercises so they have to learn how to sink into syntax. Here’s one:
Write a five line periodic sentence in rhymed iambic pentameter that has, somewhere within it, a list written in trochees, and that ends with two anapests and a spondee.
It’s fun.
Q. In discussing your style, I would also note your use of litany and the imperative, as in “Man Tries to Commit Suicide with a Crossbow” and “How to Fall in Love with Your Father,” as well as the richness of the sound of your poetry—your attention to the music of the language, to rhythm and internal rhyme, to alliteration and assonance. At what point in your creative process does sound become an important factor? Are you playing with sound from the very start—the poem’s conception—and if so, how does sound affect or develop meaning?
A. Sound comes in immediately, though I usually know what my ostensible subject is going to be first. But I often enter a poem with a line that is in my ear as much as in my head, a line that will compel me forward. Lately this comes out of litany or anaphora, and I can speculate on where that comes from, but it would be speculation. But some of the intense music stuff you’re talking about, or most of it, comes from revision. I’m a pretty slow writer, and part of that is due to the fact that I do hang on the poem’s racket for a while. I love the way a poem can feel in the mouth, the way those sounds can sort of pull the air out of other people’s mouths. I’m shooting for this level of sound work from the start, but I tend to leave a lot of blanks where the right word, someday, will fit.
Q. How has your interracial heritage influenced your work? Has it allowed you to access two cultures or led you to situations and perspectives that appear in or complicate your poems?
A. The first thing I want to say is that my interracial heritage has influenced me deeply, the way anyone’s racial heritage might influence them. I just want to make sure to complicate the question—you know, white authors aren’t very often asked this question, if ever, although white authors who never mention race are writing about race just as much as I am or Aimee Nezhukumatathil is or Amiri Baraka is. You know, Billy Collins always writes about race. Jorie Graham always writes about race. Their respective racial backgrounds have influenced their work, without question. We tend to forget that.
That said, I grew up basically in Levittown, Pennsylvania, which is a mostly white, working class suburb of Philadelphia. It’s a pretty racist place. Levittown was actually built as a segregated community—no blacks allowed—and when the first black family moved in about ten years later their house was wrecked. I think living in a place like that led me to situations that appear in my poems. Then again, one doesn’t have to go too far to stumble upon that sort of thing, though it’s different by degrees, I suppose.
My Dad was black, and my Mom is white. Anyhow, I think maybe the American paradox(es) of race are not entirely lost on me for this reason. You know, the fact of being an African-American, and Black, with a white mother, is, in itself, a paradox: a paradox that we cannot dissociate from inheritance laws, the history of slavery, forced concubinage of enslaved African women to their captors, etc. (One of the weirdest and most heartbreaking things you can do on this front is read some of the laws about racial designation, integrity, etc. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 is a good one. Of course Plessy vs. Ferguson is amazing. Not to mention reading Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Talk about paradox.) It certainly has helped me to really be confused by the idea of race, identity, kinship, loyalty, history, etc. (Though, again, I don’t know that that’s necessarily about my heritage as much as thinking about these things. I find most people puzzled by this stuff.) I don’t think I had a lot of time to feel like I knew something about race, a “knowledge” which might come from a firm notion of oneself as one thing or the other. (As a little kid I was firmly tan, neither black nor white, and my parents didn’t go about telling me what I “was” either, which was interesting. Oh but I knew “tan” was different when Kevin in the fourth grade called me a nigger, and I knew to hit him for it….) Then again, I feel like there might be some privilege (which is certainly not the right word, but I want to use it) in this “liminality.” Having the illusion of race a bit more concretely deconstructed on one’s body seems like a privilege. (But, to be clear, race is contested and deconstructed on everyone’s body: black, white, Asian, biracial or whatever.) Finally, as maybe you can tell, I’m not exactly sure how this heritage has influenced me, aside from influencing me profoundly. I spend a good deal of time thinking about these things, whether I want to or not.
And I think it’s there in the work, throughout. Yeah, throughout. And several of my new poems are very overtly, maybe more overtly, asking questions about these things.
Q. You have two serious, and am I correct in saying lifelong?, interests outside poetry: art and sports. How do art and writing intersect for you?
A. Well, they intersect in very real ways when I make artist’s books, most often in collaboration with the painter Kim Thomas. And in some of the editing I do with Q Avenue Press, a chapbook press where I very recently curated a book between Kim Thomas and the poet Simone White. But you know, I feel like the practice of painting, or drawing or print-making is, for me, very similar. That is, they all seem to demand extreme quiet, extreme contemplation. Sometimes I’ll catch myself working on some of the images for the artist’s books I make, and I will be sitting there for a long, long time staring at something before being able to touch it. It’s a similar process with the poems. On the other hand, painting is a more physical act, and it taps into, for me, some of the intelligence I have cultivated in my body, which is harder to access in my head, sometimes. You know, sometimes the body knows what mark to make, but I don’t think that’s often the case with a poem… though this could be wrong. I’ll have to figure it out.
Q. Are there ways in which being an athlete has informed your work as well?
A. Absolutely. I feel like being an athlete has taught me a good bit of discipline. I can hang in there with discomfort pretty good, maybe from training as an athlete. My friend Simone pointed this out to me, actually, that pushing through pain seems to be something athletes manage better than non-athletes. Now, I think this is applicable in terms of actually sitting down to do work when it feels unbearable, much the way you have to run two more suicides whether you want to or not. And, yup, you might puke. So I’m talking about a kind of physical discipline of doing. On the other hand, I often wonder how that training, that disregard for pain or whatever, is an impediment to being a human being. Maybe I’m speaking for myself. You see, I’m also a high school basketball coach, and there’s little I hate more than when a kid falls to the ground holding his ankle, moaning and screaming like he’s been shot, and then is up and playing five minutes later. You know? It makes me want to ring his neck. Which might be a way of not wanting to acknowledge other people’s pain. Which doesn’t seem especially helpful in terms of being a poet or an artist. Or a person.
The following can be answered in a word, a phrase, a sentence…
1. Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.
Aracelis Girmay, Patrick Rosal and Steve Scafidi
2. What kind of child were you?
Stubborn, I hear. In pictures I always seem a little nuts—either manically gleeful or boring a hole through something with my eyes. A pain in the ass, I hear.
3. What’s your relationship with rejection like?
Oh, sometimes I don’t even notice it. And sometimes I can get pretty vicious in my head about it. I think it probably depends on my self-esteem around the rejected thing.
4. Did you suffer in the process of writing this book? How?
No, not worth mentioning. I like writing poems.
5. What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?
How pleased I am to steal phrases and lines from my friends’ poems! Who knew?!
6. Do you have a writerly habit you’d like to break?
Re-reading and re-reading the same books.
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Copyright © 2008 The Southeast Review
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