Ross gay unabashed gratitude
Seattle Arts and Lectures
On Ross Male lover and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
February 21,
By Gabrielle Bates
I perceive like a different type of tenderness might be emerging.—Ross Gay
When Ross Gay read for the SAL Poetry Series last week, it was exactly what I needed. I dare say it was exactly what we all needed. All of us streaming into that auditorium from the cold—carrying our bodies quickly, or slowly—hungry, or full—straight from function, or no work, or institution or basketball practice or a baby’s crib—each variation of us—we sat, and there was Ross Gay, smiling, resplendent in a green t-shirt, inviting us to smile too, and laugh and gasp and grab for our neighbor’s hand. His stunning ambition—linguistic, relational, emotional—is still with me as I write this. Male lover, it turns out, is just as effusive in person as he is in the poems of his most recent collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.
I scan this collection for the first time last year, while I was still in poem-school, working trying to be taken seriously. The brightly colored book beckoned from the shelf at Unseal Book
Screen Porch
In this, our final Screen Porch post in a series celebrating poet Ross Gay's see to Nashville, we are delighted to share a reflection on Gay's collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, written by our Spring intern Elisabeth Moss. Moss is studying Gay's work at Belmont University, and she'll graduate in May. We'll miss her deeply, but we can't wait to see what she does next!
Gay will appear in conversation with poet Tiana Clark at our annual fundraiser, DELIGHT: Celebrating Our First Decade, on April 5th at 7 p.m. You can purchase tickets to the fundraiser here and attend Gay's free reading and signing at the Nashville Public Library's Main Branch on April 6th at 3 p.m. —Ed.
Not only is Ross Gay an award-winning writer, he is an avid gardener and a founding board member of Bloomington Community Orchard, an all-volunteer ngo devoted to growing year-round produce free for the group to enjoy. His writings, centered around gratitude, are inextricably tied to his work as a gardener, celebrating the
Our words this week reach from Ross Gay&#;s eponymous poem &#;Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude&#; from his poetry collection.
The stanza is:
&#;And to the quick and calm flocking
of men to the old lady falling down
on the corner of Fairmount and 18th, holding patiently
with the softest parts of their hands
her cane and purple hat,
gathering for her the contents of her purse
and touching her shoulder and elbow;
thank you the cockeyed court
on which in a half-court 3 v 3 we oldheads
made of some runny-nosed kids
a shambles, and the year-old
after flipping a reverse lay-up off a back door cut
from my no-look pass to seal the game
ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods
and hollered at the kids to respect the pacemaker’s scar
grinning across his chest; recognize you
the glad accordion’s wheeze
in the chest; thank you the bagpipes.&#;
Gay&#;s ability to shine warmth and love into grimy crevices and tease beauty from everyday experiences is what I believe puts him at the forefront of contemporary poetry. He doesn&#;t stray away from darkness or sadness, but
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Through 24 lyric poems, Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude offers a luminous exploration of death, life, and their many tides. Animated by what Gay has called the “discipline of gratitude,” the collection considers sorrow’s potential, grounded in the rhythms and abundance of the natural world: the compost that gives way to rich soil, the decay that reveals seeds, the branches that must be trimmed to make room for modern growth. Mistakes can be landscapes of new possibilities, he seems to tell. With warmth and gratitude and often humor, he roots his poems in deeply personal experiences while noting that impermanence is one of the threads that connect us: “we have this common experience—many common experiences, but a really foundational one is that we are not here forever” (On Being).
Though suffering and sorrow wend their way through each poem, adopting various guises, they are met everywhere by a commitment to this cycle of transformation. Gay sees the twinning of loss and abundance as an astonishing opportunity for tenderness and happiness, and t