Shayla Lawson: Hi. I am Professor Shayla Lawson. I am an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Amherst College and I am here with the DeMott Amherst Reads Feature Book of 2020 author, Ross Gay. His book the Book of Delights is a New York Times bestseller. Ross is the author of four books of poetry which include, Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, Be Holding and the Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which was the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and a 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Ross also runs The Tenderness Project with me, which is an online feature of a continuation of the gratitude that we see in a lot of process work, and he was also my graduate mentor, so we have a bit of a history together and I'm really excited to welcome him to Amherst College as our featured DeMott lecturer for 2020. Ross, how’re you doing?
Ross Gay: I'm good. I'm good. It’s good to see you. Thank you.
SL: It’s so good to see you too, especially in this time, like it's such a distance, yeah! So you are right now, you're on your porch in Bloomington?
RG: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! On the porch, in the garden. The gardens out there.
SL: I can hear the birds too. So what’s growing in your garden right now?
RG: Well there's a lot of zinnias, sun flowers which are bringing the hummingbirds, and then the okras producing, the sweet potatoes are gone crazy, the kale and collards are big, the beans, the potatoes and tomatoes and sweet peppers, hot peppers, a lot of chard. Yeah!
SL: As we’re just watching you canvas the garden, you know, it’s kind of, you’re looking at it like a globe and watching the things that are growing. I mean as long as I’ve known you, gardening has been a big part of your artistic practice and also just kind of your social practice and good for your soul. I’m curious about how you feel being a gardener and an urban farmer informs your work.
RG: It's such a great question and we had that class together, Writing the Earth.
SL: We did, yeah, Writing the Earth.
RG: Which is where I was first like, oh Sheila is an amazing essayist.
SL: Oh thank you.
RG: Yeah. You know, so many things about it, about being in a garden, or you know gardening are important and I can go on and on about this, but I'll just try to think of a couple. One is like, you know, if you're in a garden or your gardening you're sort of just watching things very closely all the time. You know, it encourages you to be attentive and to pay attention to like minute changes and nuance and like the difference between how… you know there's something I notice at some point, you know when the cabbage moths come around. The cabbage moths they eat all the Brassicas, the kales and the collards and the cabbage and stuff, and I notice when the cabbage moths come along shortly after this, there’s a wasp that comes along and I don't know if it's the case that this wasp likes to eat those cabbage moths but I suspect it might be. There's some relation… they don't show up before that. But I wouldn't have noticed that had I not been kind of just like looking like what's going on, closely, in a slow way. I think that is like really deeply informative in terms of how I like think about writing and how I try to write. Like look very closely, like with deep attention. There's also this thing that I love to mention which is that you know there are many other ways that we can sort of think about metaphor but one of the best ways for me to think about metaphors, to think about like how the seed of a kale plant for instance, it is tiny, it's like a little freckle or something, and within that seed is actually it's not an abstract, it's actually the fact that is all the material that could become like thousands of pounds of kale you know. Because that would be for example, one plant. That plant will then make maybe you know I don't know 500 seeds. Those 500 seeds will then all make, I don't know 500 seeds. I mean this thing, so like what that's just like as good a meta… what teacher metaphor is as I know. There's many good teacher metaphor…
SL: So when it comes to metaphor, what as a reader and writer when it comes to metaphor, like what are you looking for. Like what is it that to you when you hear it or when you see it or smell it, like structure is like a good metaphor?
RG: Yeah...Yeah…Yeah. I guess - I guess you know, something that actually disrupts my understanding of the world, you know. And those are the metaphors that I'm like really longing for and you know that these moments… at these moments like we're in right now I feel like I am looking for metaphors that actually totally disrupt my sense of the world or my sense of my own understanding of myself. And like just the other day I was… yesterday I was thinking of, I think I have this line right, from Patrick Rosal poem, a dear friend of mine. But he had the line where he says, the God of rage is the God of sorrow with both eyes torn out.
SL: Wow!
RG: Yes. Something like that.
SL: Yeah! That’s amazing.
RG: Right and it's just like, oh that is a… that is a kind of understanding or metaphor that feels like, oh that… that's going to, that's going to help me understand my rage.
SL: Right.
RG: Maybe in a way that will change my life you know.
SL: So it's the God of sorrow with his eyes torn out?
RG: It’s a God of sorrow with his eyes torn out.
SL: It's really… it's really crazy to think about. I like the action in that of seeing this really frustrated God who is just you know lashing out and moving all over the place because of the lack of sight. Yeah - no…it's a gorgeous metaphor and really surprising.
RG: Right…right…right. Or… or another one is in this beautiful essay which he also made a poem. I forget what the name of it is but this June Jordan essay, it's my…maybe my favorite phrase that I yet know in the language. And it's, the phrase is, “in mercy fathom”. But she talks about like it's this… I was recently talking about this someplace else, but it's this essay about the moon landing in…whenever that was 1968, 1969 and like a bunch of public intellectuals were asked to contest, sort of write about the moon landing and she basically was like why the **** waste all this money when we could do all these other things. And she says what if instead we did this, we did this, we in mercy fathom. And I’m like, suddenly mercy becomes something with depths to plumb, like a river or an ocean. And like in a phrase that's a metaphor. Like in mercy fathom - it's not like, it's not like, a tree is a house, which is ******* awesome metaphor too. It's like, in mercy we fathom.
SL: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: All the rivers. All the oceans. Mercy is all the oceans, all the river.
SL: And I think of mercy as a measure of depth. I don’t think it's something we ever think about.
RG: Right. Right.
SL: I think most of the time we think about it is relinquishing control or showing some kind of inordinate restraint and not about it being as you said, layered and you know and carrying the depth of oceans and seas and…
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And when I think treehouse, I remember this essay of Aracelis Germay’s in about From Woe To Wonder, the Gwendolyn Brooks poem and it's about…it's about many things. But she actually… she talks about her kid like, is… is getting fascinated with tree houses which are fascinating.
SL: I agree.
RG: She realizes at some point in the essay she says she realized that she wrote it down “free house”.
SL: Oh! Oh!
RG: And boom! Metaphor.
SL: Yeah! Oh my God it's beautiful. I was thinking when you mention Patrick Rosal because the two of you aside from being great buddies, you also ran a magazine together called Some Call It Ballin? Is that true?
RS: Yeah totally.
SL: You both heavy basketball fans?
RG: Yeah, yeah, yeah! It was a sports magazine and it was… you won’t [inaudible] another issue. The last one was great but … we’ll work up another issue for sure. And it was… we were just sitting around at a coffee shop in Brooklyn I think. Thinking, man sports writing is ******** boring you know.
SL: Yeah. Sports writing needs more poets, it really does.
RG: That's exactly what we said. Sports writing needs more poets.
SL: Yeah
RG: Yeah. So we ran a couple of issues and I guarantee you, I shouldn't say that, but it's fun to say: I guarantee you we’ll do another one you know. And maybe we will do it every… on the clock that we need you know.
SL: Yeah you know it's like every three or four years we get you know…
RG: Yeah. Cool.
SL: You know decade, quarterly, every half a decade we get another…another issue of Some Call It Ballin. But it seems like you like collaborating with other artists with other writers to do projects. You have a chat book with Aimee Nezhukumatathil where the two of you wrote poems, long letters back and forth. It was epistolary right where you wrote back and forth to each other, from each other’s gardens. What do you think it is that that drives you as a writer and an artist to do all these collaborations?
RG: It’s such a beautiful question and I mean I feel like The Tenderness Project like it's just interesting to me to sort of like be like what do we… what do we do? You know that question seems like the best question. What do we do? I think I love… I love conversation you know I think I'm a I'm a thinker who's like a I don't know if I'm saying this right but like a dialogic thinker. Like I I realize sometimes that I'll be having, actually in some interviews, I'm so excited for this interview because I knew that we knew how to… I know how to talk with you. Like we know how to talk, we’re friends.
SL: Yeah
RG: And sometimes I can be in interviews and I realize they're just ask questions and I'm supposed to just give an answer. But my… my actual…and I realize that could make me uncomfortable then I started realizing oh that's because you're like a thinker and you think in conversation, you know like.
SL: Yeah.
RG: So all these projects feel like opportunities to sort of think in conversation. It even is funny that you said that 'cause even today I was like… I was… put in a… what do you call… a Box of Chapbooks, a collaborative Chapbook between Dawn Lundy Martin and Toi Derricotte, which I didn't know about.
SL: I didn't know that existed. I want one.
RG: I'm doing the graduate workshop this semester and I was like, [inaudible] not making collaboration.
SL: Yeah. I have a… I was thinking about that idea of questions and I think a lot about a question that I see people asking about when it comes to The Book Of Delights, it feels like every time I've seen you read or do interviews, like people are always kind of asking you about… how do I put it? It’s like you know, what … 'cause a lot of people look at The Book Of The Delights and they make the assumption that it's a project that's ongoing in your life. That it's kind of your life project to continue to write these delights even though, it's like, it's clearly states in the introduction of the book, that this was, you know project based. It is finite. You wanted to see what it was like to do this, to devote yourself to this practice for a year. Which I think is really beautiful. The idea of like giving yourself a timeline and saying I'm gonna do this one thing for a year and see what I see. But I notice a lot of people are like you know what is it like to live in this state of delight? Or to constantly be thinking about the things that delight you in the world? And living in the world like this every day? And one of the things that I think about, I remember when I first heard you read from what became The Book With The Delights, it really for me, came out of an essay that you wrote some years ago that I think was published in The Sun about getting pulled over by the police as a black man.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SL: Yeah. I felt that there was a really strong tie between the revolutionary spirit of the essay and the anger that manifested itself in that essay and how do you channel rage in a way that continues to… to fulfill your humanity? You know that feeds your humanity more than it does the idea of a stereotype?
RG: Totally.
SL: And that's one of the things that I feel people often miss in reading The Book Of Delights that I just wanted to make sure…
RG: Yeah.
SL: … we talked about. So it's not really a question. I just wanted to give you like, you know, just setting up the shot.
RG: I’m so glad you said it because it's like one of the things about, you know book and also like my last book of the poems, A Catalog Of Unabashed Gratitude, it’s like
SL: Yeah.
RG: …like you know, really you heard me say this before, but like… and I realized this in the past handful of years having these conversations, that my project is, my subject is joy. Joy is not just happy. Joy is the whole thing. It is sort of in some kind of way like what's beneath. Though you know joy is like this deep lifelong practice and study that is not to me what we think of is like you know, what we often commodify as joy. You know joy is like you know, joy understands that we are dying and we are going to die you know. And joy ask the question probably about like how do we love each other in the midst of that? And how do we love each other with that? And through that? And all of the other things you know. And so often people they say something like you know man Ros he could turn anything into…he could make like… you didn't read… you didn't read the book!
SL: You didn’t read the book! You read the title!
RG: I know exactly. Did you read past that? You know in The Book Of Delights it’s like, it goes… it goes deep.
SL: Yeah. Yeah.
RG: Like this book is about, like the book is about sorrow as well. Deeply about sorrow. And some of the essays in there that I think are most important to me are the essays… I mean I love like, an essay then tries to… that serves like a short snapshot of something that's just sort of like delightful you know. They’re very few. They’re actually very few that don't touch into like the whatever. The other the “what we need to fathom”, you know.
SL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
RG: But… but the ones that I'm like I go back and read and read and read and read are like really you know the essay Loitering you know.
SL: That’s the one I was thinking about too. Especially for a couple of couple reasons. I’m going to jump in because there are things that I want to say about Loitering:
RG: Go ahead.
SL: One of them being, when we talk about that idea of what mercy requires, and mercy, having fathoms or, mercy fathoming, is with that essay on Loitering, I feel like it’s a pawn shop that your character was loitering in front of and were treated really badly that you had…
RG: That’s another essay.
SL: Oh that’s a different one!
RG: Exactly! Totally! Yeah.
SL: So which one is that one? Because I was just thinking, 'cause you have this great way, there's this great turn where it's like that doesn't exist anymore you know. Oh joy, like…
RG: Exactly! That’s one of the things. Yeah I'm sort of like the delight is that the place doesn't exist…
SL: Yes!
RG: …but the whole embedded in it is that, damn ******* sitting here having a nice cup of coffee is like you can’t be afraid.
SL: You’re just enjoying yourself.
RG: You need to move on.
SL: Right. Yeah.
RG: But the Loitering essay, of course, I didn't even actually think about it, but the Loitering essay is, that is embedded in that because that talks about all these moments of being [inadudible]
SL: Yep and it's the one that has the different definitions of loitering. You know like ******* around and…yeah.
RG: Yeah! Yeah! That's right. Loafing, meandering. Yeah.
SL: Yeah. And I thought about…. loafing, idling.
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SL: I love that one too because of the fact that you turned it into a place in Bloomington. You know you created a… it was I guess, tell us more about it, I think it’s attached to the printing press that you also collaborate on, is a loitering space that you just opened up so people would have a place to like loaf and **** around and…
RG: That’s right. Yeah. That’s funny 'cause I actually… we printed one thing that's called the Loiterary.
SL: Yeah.
RG: It's just like a place that you can just hang around you know. Don't have to be anywhere; don't have to do anything you know. We have books. You know if you wanna hang around.
SL: Yeah. You wanna hang around. Ther’s some chairs and an electric tea kettle and just you know go about it like.
RG: Yeah. And not be told to move on or get on with it, to make something. If you want to, go for it, you know.
SL: I love that seeing the approach and take on the physical space and think about that too with bringing the shovel down. And then again I don't know exactly the timeline, but I associate like bringing the shovel down with you founding the Bloomington Community Orchard. I think about those you know how poetry becomes not only just this recognition of space or this watching of space, but in your work it also starts to take becomes physical spaces that you start to manifest in the world, and the columns feel like these places where you're working out these problems that you didn't take back into the world's physical solutions that people kind of inhabit.
RG: That's beautiful. And…and…that’s beautiful. The… I was just at the Orchard yesterday and so I was like one of… I was on the board, the founding board. But the… and I think of like the… the person who's like sort of the founder, she lives like a couple of doors down. And yes I think of having been involved with that project for now 10 years right. Like the ways that the writing itself can kind of participate in the imagining of a space and then the way that the space itself… 'cause I was thinking like that project has been so important to me in terms of thinking. All the stuff we're talking, about like the idea of a loiterary, you know the idea of a place where we can kind of hang out, dream together a little bit in a different relationship to time and space and like obligation or something. Some of that was learned for sure from the sort of deep intentional care that the Orchard comes out of, that I learned by being with all these people, dreaming about this Orchard. So it's like… and then that study, you know, that study comes into my writing and then the writing turns into more physical space.
SL: Yeah.
RG: Yeah. But I hadn’t thought of it until you put it like that. Yeah.
SL: I have so many questions. I have two questions on my mind. I wish I could ask them simultaneously. You were mentioning time. And I'm just wondering what is… what is time for you in 2020? What does that… what does that mean for you now? Not adding any… any, you know particular loaded definition of all the things that we're seeing going on in the world right now, but I'm just curious like what is… what is time for you at this particular moment?
RG: You know when you said that I have this… this… line in this poem that's coming out, this book that’s coming out, it's long [inaudible]. I have this line that is like something we say, which is that, Nothing happens only when it happens. Nothing ever happens only when it happens. And I feel like, I mean I feel much more attuned to the ways that that is the case. And that… and I think… I think more people are becoming more attuned to that you know what I mean. That you know… that… that book which is not The Book Of Delights that book, I was just thinking about it the other day. I meditated on this little basketball move with not a little basketball… the best basketball move ever. It takes three seconds and in the course of the poem, the poem sort of, does its writing in the span of the… of the speaker, I think is in a way five hours or six or seven hours. And then the span of what is talked about in poem is like 400 some years you know. And I'm certain I think in some ways that's sort of what I'm thinking about time. You know this thing that I'm doing now, I sometimes might think that I'm doing this thing now, but I'm not just… I'm doing this thing 400 years from now. And 400 hundred years that way made this [inaudible].
SL: I totally get that. Yeah.
RG: How’re you? What do you think about time right now?
SL: Oh… I still think, my last two books have ended really… really heavily on meditations and time. So for me I… so the Frank Ocean book, the last poetry book that I wrote ends with the concept of residence time which shows up in Christina Sharpe’s work and in Michelle Wright’s work. You know thinking about the idea that as a black person who has ancestors who came through the middle passage, that anytime I encounter a body of water, I'm still imbibing my ancestors. And we're still here in all of these different capacities. There's this constant transience between the past and the present that I feel very deeply connected to being made predominantly out of water and thinking of what it means for my relatives to have been immersed in water. And I think a lot about…I love Daughters Of The Dust, and I remember that I think it was a conversation that I had with you in grad school. It was the first time that I was introduced to the story of the… I guess it would be a branch of the Gullah people who were slaves that were brought over under…in strict sense, were brought over but not under duress, that they were artisans and time travelers and merchants who were told that they were going to be brought over to colonize, and to start the new world. And once they realized that as they approached South Carolina and they were… that it was a slave ship and they were going to be slaves, they opted to put themselves back into the water and so I think about that a lot. I think it's one of the things that makes me… I want… I want to be here because there's a lot more things that I think I’m meant to do, but I don't worry a whole lot about death. I think about going back into the water in a way that so many of us have.
RG: Yeah. Right.
SL: And I think of that as being kind of this particularly African diasporic narrative of things being… time being a spiral, and they were all connected through this very particular spiral of time. That's something that I spent a lot of time meditating on. I like a lot of my meditation sessions. I go through different versions of me being narratives that I've heard of my ancestors. So what little that I know of them I'll start to see them in different capacities and it was part of what helped me finish the last essay collection. It was really coming to terms with the stories that my…in this case I connected like my great grandmother to Nina Simone, and the urge for…the urge for violence… the you know, the necessity of being angry in the face of domestic terrorism or domestic violence. And I like the idea that channeling is a great word to kind of talk about that if we're talking about the water. That I spent a lot of time thinking about how I channel these particular stories and how they're never, there never dead or gone or past as long as we continue that… the channeling.
RG: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s so beautiful. I've been thinking about… I've been doing a little for this land book that I'm working on I've been doing
SL: Oh good. 'Cause I had a space question.
RG: I've been thinking about you know like -I've been doing some research and one of my… this is very important figure in our family, Biggie who my dad's grand… grandmother and she's sort of like this mythical like… her… she's a hero in the family. The matriarch and also like the gardener. And she's so - so some of the stuff that I always grow, the stuff that I heard that Biggie grow, you know. And she was gone before… before I ever got to - she was little - we were little when she died. But I was doing some research with my uncle, my dad's little brother about her family, where she came from and Mississippi and Port Gibson and Mississippi. And there's a point in the lineage where their name was McKay and you know in the paper that we saw it says McKay, James McKay, white man and Biggie’s. So Biggie’s…Biggie's dad was mixed, and Biggie's grandfather was a white man. And in the paper it says, this is ancestry.com. Or whatever ancestry, whatever that is. And the other name is, unknown slave. And then there was someone who commented that the family story that they had was that, that woman was sold away while James McKay, Biggie's father was a little boy. And I've been writing a lot… lot about my father who is… I'm always writing about my father - is just like this complicated, you know beautifully complicated, black man born in 1945 Youngstown, OH. And we have a complicated rela... we had and have a complicated relationship and it’s sweeter every second. And I have been thinking about how in his body - in our bodies we carried it. We’re carrying that, you know. And there's some way that I don't know… I don't know what the practices are, but there's many practices of course, but like some of it is to be like you… know - to know that we're carrying that. And when you said that, when you reminded me that we're mostly water, and I've been kind of imagining - I've been thinking about a lot of stuff – music, like you I'm always thinking about all this stuff through all the stuff. And this song, by Sweet Honey in The Rock called, long way home - Long Journey HomeI, and the first verse is:
If you see my little sister going from door to door
Tell her to go on and find her way
'Cause Lynn ain’t coming home, no more
…Just been thinking about that person, who's younger than I am, you know. And who is in my body. And I've been imagining about her quite a lot. But hearing you talk, it makes me think, oh she's in the water in my body too. Yeah. Just like my dad. My dad - she was in my father you know. And Biggie is in us; in the water. It’s just a matter of that metaphor and also the fact that the epigenetic fact that there are boats in our body, you know.
SL: It’s a big thing. It makes me excited. I was just thinking about you know the ways that water can channel electricity and now you know all these different things. Yeah but we can't do this forever. We gotta wrap up. So I wanted to talk a little bit to ask you just one more thing. You mentioned two projects that you're working on now, Be Holding which is a poetry collection. And what is the name of the book that you're writing about black farming?
RG: Yeah. Yeah. Right now that's called This Blacker.
SL: OK.
RG: Yeah. That's a book about my relationship to the land. And it's… it's evolving every second it gets… it goes a different way. Like I think - I thought something and then it goes another way and then I'm like OK. So there’s that and the poem which comes out in September. It's a long poem and Christina Sharpe - deeply influenced by Christina Sharpe’s work and [inaudible] work, and so many people. But it's a poem that sort of frames itself as being about this - looking at this basketball movie. But it's… it's a… it's like kind of like family narratives; it's about like the spectacle you know, it's about spectacle and it's about the disorder the spectacle of black violence upon Black people you know. Black pain. It's about practices of care you know. It's about like how… how do we, I mean the question shows up again and again in the book like, what am I looking at? what am I seeing; how do we look? Yeah. It’s a long poem so you know It’s a long poem. There’s some pictures in it.
SL: So looking forward to this. So we can expect that in… in September?
RG: Yeah. I think {inaudible} September is the date it comes out.
SL: Nice. Alright. Yeah. Any last words or thoughts for the Amherst community before we close up this interview?
RG: I'm just glad to get to be - to be with you all in the way that we're with each other these days. And you Shayla, I'm just glad to get to talk with you, 'cause it feels like lucky to collaborate, think and can be making things together. You know what I mean.
SL: True. Yeah. I feel very lucky. So I guess we're going to close this up. This has been an interview with Amherst College’s 2020 DeMott lecture, Ross Gay. Congratulations from us for being our DeMott Amherst Reads picks for the year. And we look forward to spending more time with you, you know. Welcome to Amherst College.
RG: Thank you.
SL: Thank you so much.