Ross gay poetry
The Poem That Changed My Life: Ross Gay&#;s "Bringing the Shovel Down"
Not so very long ago&#;five years perhaps&#;I opened the pages of a book and began to read a poem that entirely reconfigured my notions of what a poem can execute. The poem was Ross Gay&#;s &#;Bringing the Shovel Down.&#; And, as is so often the case with world-transforming revelations, the encounter also hit me with the force of profoundest remembering: Here was an instance, a glorious, exfoliating instance, of all I had always hoped and believed about the ways and wherewithal of art. &#;Because I love you,&#; begins this poem, &#;and beneath the uncountable stars / I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest, // I wish to tell you a story I shouldn&#;t but will&#;&#;
Because I love you. The stakes are high, at once both intimate and mysterious: Who is this &#;you&#;? Who is speaking to the &#;you&#;? What has either of them to do with me? Everything, says the poem, as it moves through the vastness of the starry sky to the inwardness of the pulse in the breast with the hook tha
Listen to my favorite playlist. Verb some potato chips. Snuggle with my dog. Watch TV and go to sleep. Go for a walk. Play a video game. Call my mom.
At the end of a volunteer shift on the Crisis Text Line I sometimes ask texters to tell me something friendly they can do for themselves after we say goodbye. Just a small good thing, only for yourself. This question seems to make them happy, and it makes me happy too. How small and simple and ordinary the things we adore are.
Sorrow Is Not My Label, by Ross Gay (for Walter Aitken)
—after Gwendolyn Brooks
No matter the pull toward brink. No
matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look,
just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me,
and I looked at him, admiring
the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and,
after arranging that good suit of feathers
he up and took off.
Just appreciate that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring nice things,
some with names so generous as to kick
the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,
Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the municipality they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig its
arms pulling the
September star to it
and she
has a hose too
and so works hard
rinsing and scrubbing
the walk
lest some poor sod
slip on the
silk of a fig
and break his hip
and not probably
reach over to gobble up
the perpetrator
the light catches
the veins in her hands
when I ask about
the trunk they
flutter in the air and
she says take
as much as
you can
help me
so I load my
pockets and mouth
and she points
to the step-ladder against
the wall to
mean more but
I was without a
sack so my meager
plunder would have to
suffice and an old woman
whom gravity
was pulling into
the earth loosed one
from a low slung
branch and its eye
wept like hers
which she dabbed
with a kerchief as she
cleaved the fig with
what rema
Poetry Moment: 'Thank You', by Ross Gay
This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the operate of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a Monson Arts Fellow, author of twenty books, and professor of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Some poems are meant for carrying around in your pocket or for taping above your desk. You need to experience them every day. Today’s poem, “Thank You” by Ross Gay, is like that. Let it step in your life. Its images and insights remind us to inhabit this moment, this now.
Ross Gay grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, playing football and basketball, and later attended Lafayette College, where he played football and discovered his love for poetry. He’s the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, which won the Noun American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the National Novel Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first co