approach it with wonder: A Conversation with Ross Gay on the Method to Solidarity and Our Intrinsic Connection

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in 2022.

On April 11, 2023, Ross Gay joined The Interlochen Review editors Xime Silva, Sophie Bernik, Emily Pickering, and Ben Berman for a conversation about his poetry book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and his essay collections The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy.

XIME SILVA: In your poem "Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt," you use tactile details to explore the physicality of the body and the act of dressing oneself. How do you approach writing about the body in your work, and what role do you see it playing in your exploration of themes such as joy, grief, and connection to others?

ROSS GAY: I don’t know how to approach it. I never thought about how I would approach it. But I do think that I’m interested in bodies because bodies die. I’m interested in things changing, how things change. How the fact of our lives is held by these bodies, for the time being, anyway, is an interesting subject to me. That subject of how we change, which also sometimes has to do with how we suffer. That pain sometimes is involved with change, that loss sometimes is change. It also has to do with joy. In this last book of mine, I suggest that joy is the light whenever we help each other carry our sorrows. The facts of our bodies being these permeable, delicate, vulnerable, and the fact that we love each other, you might say, is the source of our sorrows. That’s a long way of saying that bodies are very interesting. Bodies are the source of so much of that. As far as how I go about it, I don’t know.

SOPHIE BERNIK: Personally, I found there to be an overwhelming feeling of hope in your writing. For instance, the opening poem of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, “the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” which balances on the line between what is violent and what is tender. Is hope a feeling you want to inspire in your readers? Do you believe hope is a productive or valuable feeling?

RG: Hope is great. It’s great. There’s someone in the hall where I teach, at Indiana University, that has a sign that says “hope is a discipline.” And I agree, I agree. There’s often a kind of political utilization of the idea of hope that is, “we’re not going to do anything, but keep hoping.” There’s that kind of hope, which is a corrupted notion of hope. But then there’s the kind of hope when you see a kid, or put a seed in the ground that might grow into a good kale crop or something that feeds us. I want to cultivate that sense, that understanding, of being able to witness and understand the abundance and caretaking of the earth. In a way it feels like observation, close observation of what is. It might be that the discipline of hope is the discipline of attending to, noticing, witnessing, or studying the ways of care that we’re in the midst of. Do I hope that that comes through and other readers might feel that way? I think that’s a good feeling. I also feel like so many feelings are contagious. So if you feel, like you spoke with the fig tree poem, if you feel in the midst of, say, state brutality or dumb cruelty, to be like “look, we’re feeding each other!” That happens too. That happens way more often than the other thing. I think cultivating and practicing understanding that and witnessing and noticing that, that feels very interesting to me. That’s the thing I’m trying to do.

EMILY PICKERING: Where would you say your fascination and artistic intensity towards the concept of “unabashed gratitude” first originated from?

RG: Where did it originate? I have no idea. I can tell you that my third book is called Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. That book was originally going to be called Ode to the Mundane World. That title came about because I was at this reading where a lot of these poets were writing— beautiful stuff, but stuff that was necessarily difficult. All across the board, there was a kind of bleakness. I thought, there needs to be another register for this. And the register is “amidst the bleakness.” Which is a real thing, it needs to be sung about, this other which is this question of gratitude. Gratitude, which I think about, does not exist minus the bleakness. Adult gratitude understands the bleakness. It’s not just #gratitude. It’s actually, how do we survive? What is it that’s kept us surviving in the midst of what we ought to also be mourning?

XS: How has your exploration and articulation of gratitude through your writing evolved over time, and how do you continue to find inspiration for new expressions of gratitude in your work?

RG: How has it evolved? I think it’s just sort of growing, you know. It’s funny because even though I called that book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, I wasn’t actually thinking about gratitude. But when you write a book called Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, if you’re lucky enough to have people read it, which people did read that book, then you have to start thinking about gratitude. What does gratitude mean, you know? But I wasn’t explicitly thinking about that, although even in my first book, my last poem is called “Thank You.” So it’s obviously been an interest of mine, but the evolution, I think, is toward a more perpetual and persistent notion of gratitude. It feels like gratitude is a practice. In a way, the thing I would wonder about is that the older I get, the more I’m in tune with the number of things and the immensity of what one might be grateful for.

BEN BERMAN: In Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, you tackle big concepts such as joy and grief, and also in Inciting Incidents and Book of Delights when you discuss the loss of your father. How do you go about writing your way into such big emotions?

RG: I just put the pen on the page and write. I’m not preparing. So this might be a useful response—I write about what I have questions about, not what I know about. For instance, that essay in Inciting Joy about the five or so months of my father's death…which is a ridiculous thing to say. The five or so months that he was explicitly dying of cancer. I wanted to wonder about that experience, you know? My experience with him, with other people. But also I was wondering about my experience with my father and my relationship to my father, period, and along the way, my relationship with my mother and my brother. How do I go about approaching it? I want to approach things that I have questions about. I’m less inclined as a writer to go after things that I'm sure about. Part of the pleasure about writing for me, even writing this nonfiction, is that I think—I’m writing that essay about me and my dad—I know the story. I know the story, yet I have no idea what’s going to happen. So that to me is sort of the pleasure. I approach it with wonder, you know? I approach it with wonder. That’s how.

EP: In your poetry, particularly in Catalog, you navigate incorporating simple yet precise language while avoiding redundancy. How do you consistently accomplish this balance of craft?

RG: Revise like hell. That’s how. I love revising, I love it. I’m actually just finishing another book and I have to send it in and I could revise it for the next ten years, easy. You know? I could just keep on going. So, anyway, that’s sort of how. Whatever things I’m trying to make happen in the poems, I’m very conscious about it. But also—this is important, too—I also have beloved readers who look at my work and they see things that I don’t see all the time, whether that’s my editor or it’s the people I share work with.

SB: Throughout the Book of Delights and Catalog, you spend much time describing a joy which is not entirely based on happiness. Because of this, your writing seems opposed to the idea of clean and simple happy endings. As an author who spends much time writing about joy, how do you find yourself dealing with cliché?

RG: I think, to me, joy is not an emotion that exists absent of sorrow. It’s totally tangled up with sorrow, fear, all these things. And joy, I think maybe that ‘cliché’ question exists because we often are offered this idea of joy that’s a kind of hallmark idea of joy. It’s not a complicated idea of joy. But I’m more interested in this larger question, which is how do we care for one another through our sorrows? Or how do we practice belonging to one another? Part of the practice of belonging to one another is tending to each other’s heartbreak. And it might be the case that, the older we get, the more there seem to be. So that in itself is a kind of complicated emotion. And joy, to me, the way we know it’s a complicated emotion is it seems to be expressed as often at funerals as at births, and expressed as powerfully. Cliché is basically just a sort of overused language. But also cliché can get into this sort of uncomplicated thought, which I will call sentimentality. A kind of boring, cliche sentimentality. I had a teacher named Thomas Lux who said “you’re trying to write poems of true sentiment.” Which is different from sentimentality, which is the kind of imposition of feeling where feeling has not yet been arrived at. And maybe that’s the thing that is less inclined to be cliché. It’s nuanced, it’s unpredictable. It doesn't know where it’s going. Cliché knows where it’s going.

BB: I’ve noticed, in your essays specifically, you utilize a lot of asides as a tool, what do you enjoy about asides and what makes them fascinating to use?

RG: Well, one is that they’re conversational. I like people who tell stories and then just take off and digress, like there’s eight stories connected to this one story. And in a way I feel like I learned this with Catalog. Among the voices that I’m trying to cultivate in my writing is a voice that is really trying to talk to you. I’m also interested in the ways our thinking is not linear. It’s not A-Z. It takes off all over the place. And there’s something beautiful to me about the kind of inefficiency of that. It’s not precise, it’s not direct, it’s not concise. It’s more like the way water is. It goes where there’s places to go. I had a teacher named Gerald Stern who was so digressive. I learned that from him, I’m sure, as a kind of writerly technique. I like not knowing where it’s going.

SB: Throughout the Book of Delights, you spend time meditating on issues like capitalism and climate change. What role do you believe an artist should serve in today's political landscape, and do you believe in apolitical art?

RG: Well, you can argue that everything is political, even a kind of apoliticalness is political, and sometimes we mean that sort of negatively. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable approach to say, “I’m going to withdraw from what we think of as the political,” for any number of reasons; for instance, that corporations own everything. I don’t think an artist should serve any [role in a political landscape]; if an artist wants to be involved, if there’s a way they find to be politically engaged, that’s awesome. But I also feel like that’s not a requirement. I remember, I was in a panel with someone named Jean Valentine; I was young, thirty-one or thirty-two, and I had just been reading the astonishing poet Muriel Rukyser, her book The Book of the Dead, where she goes down to West Virginia and studies mining situations. All of these workers were being exposed to conditions that gave them silicosis; their lungs were turning to glass. And as that was going on, the price of the mining corporations, the shareholders were making money of of these people dying, not unlike stuff that’s going on at this moment, the train wreck in East Palestine, that is the result of people gouging human life, enriching themselves at the expense of life. Anyway, Muriel Rukeyser, as a young writer, went down to West Virginia to do journalistic poetry, and I was just so moved by that. I thought, that's so courageous, because she’s so young. It’s also like, when you go sniffing around this kind of brutality, to expose that kind of brutality, things can happen to you, and I was like, she is tough. She is tough. And I was going on about that and admiring it, and Jean Valentine, who writes very differently, her work inhabits a different space, some people might call it a dream space, said: Ross, you don’t have to do that. Changed my life! Of course not everyone does that. And you need writers to do everything. It’s awesome that some writers are absolutely involved in what we think of as a political sphere, and it’s very important to me that some writers are invested in a sphere that has no bearing at all.

BB: I’ve seen a lot in your poetry, such as “A Small Needful Fact,” and “Ode to the Flute,” a very conversational tone that you like to use, and also in your essays, you tend to lean on a very lyrical side. What makes you choose to write this way in both genres and what do you find about the forms poetry and essays that helps articulate your work best?

RG: The truth is, I probably write that way because I’m trying to write what I want to read. When you’re writing what you want to read, you start to get outside of the idea of what other people want, and all of these things, writer’s block and perfectionism, start to fade away. I feel like I mix the kind of lyrical and conversational, and I’m starting to work on those things, which I’ve sort of arrived at through a lot of revision, that conversational tone, and trying to find the music and rhythm. I love it. I love the sound of a beautiful sentence. I love how much thinking a sentence can do, what a pause, a kind of breathlessness or line breaking, can do. I love the way that sound itself can carry or convey meaning in a different kind of way. Long way of saying, I like doing it.

EP: In your poem “The Opening,” you’re able to select and draw out these very specific details that shape the body of the piece. When approaching a specific subject, how do you choose which images to emphasize or which further the emotional tension of the poem?

RG: In a certain kind of way, the images, I think, arrive and preserve themselves. There’s a choosing that’s going on, but I don’t know how the images ultimately arrive and how they preserve themselves. It’s neat, because when I’m writing several images-—I like images. They arrive in all kinds of ways, but then again, the revision process is figuring out which of these images is the best for the poem. That poem that you’re talking about,“The Opening,”has several images. As I read that poem just the other night, I was like, they’re kind of intense and hard sometimes to catch, but then there’s a primary image that runs through the poem of this character, the speaker and a version of himself, pointing at something. It takes a whole poem to get to. But then, ultimately, they’re pointing at this peach tree and this bird singing a song. I don’t know how to honestly articulate how that arrived, but it probably arrived through the music and the thinking of the poem that I did not enter the poem knowing. Understanding arrives sort of mysteriously. And then the second question is, how do you tune up the images or select those images. It’s different in every single poem.

BB: One thing I was really fascinated about is how you utilize talking about culture now and, in one of your poems, “A Small Needful Fact,” you start the poem and transition into talking about the murder of a black man due to police brutality. I’m wondering, what about talking about political and social culture now do you find elevates your writing?

RG: I’m not interested in elevation. It's sort of the same —I’m writing about what I have questions about, and that’s an example of that. In every poem, I can look at the poem and see that there’s these questions that the poem is asking or interacting with.

BB: One thing you point out in Inciting Joy, you talk about other people's disbelief and almost lack of seriousness when you talk about writing about joy and delights. Is there anything that you find that still currently prevents you from writing about joy, and how do you try to get past that?

RG: No. No, there’s really not. I’m going through these sorts of struggles but I think now, I’m writing what I wanna write about. And it comes back to the question of Sophie’s, the presumption is that joy is a simple emotion and not worthwhile in terms of this serious, intellectual, artistic endeavor. But, once you sort of realize that it’s as complicated and as tangled up as anything that we have to think about, then those questions are just out the window. Those sorts of questions, those policings. They’re policing about what we’re able to write about, which feels important. It feels important to acknowledge what we are and what we are not supposed to write about and, as far as I’m concerned, to test those, if not just disregard them.

EP: Your work pretty consistently circles this, but how would you say one can use joy as a method for solidarity and for connecting with others?

RG: I like that word method. It’s neat, because when we talk about methodology, that just means the way. That’s funny… I’ve never thought of joy as a method. Because I mainly think about witnessing or attending to or noticing or studying joy, which is the feeling we have when we practice belonging to one another. And there are all these practices that to me constitute that. There are all these practices inside of which we can see: Oh! That’s a practice of belonging to one another. Like the community garden, that’s a practice of belonging to one another. In my book I talk about pick-up basketball, I talk about school, the best moments of school, as being these sites of practices or something of belonging to one another. Entanglement is a word that I love to say. I think about it as a kind of study or a witnessing. You witness that, or you participate in it. You feel joy. The feeling of joy is the feeling of belonging to one another. Solidarity is the feeling or expression of belonging to one another. What I like about that word method, is that method and practice are very close in meaning. It does feel like when you talk about a kind of methodology of joy, it comes back to this question of the grave seriousness of joy, because it implies that there’s a method to solidarity. That’s so funny, that’s a clearer way of saying what I was trying to say, actually, in my book. The method to solidarity might be joy.

BB: In a lot of your work, you talk about serious topics such as racism and loss and grief. And you talk about them with such big fascination. For example, when I listened to the audiobook of the Book of Delights, the way that you talk throughout the book was so interesting. Your voice contributed to the book so much. And I’m wondering: how do you find yourself talking about such heavy topics for people in such a way that’s so uplifting.

RG: Maybe because there’s an element in the delights that implies that, not all of this but some of this, we go through together. One of the essays that’s the main kernel for my book, Inciting Joy, is called “Joy is Such Human Madness,” and that’s a riff on a Zadie Smith essay. It implies that we all are, in a certain kind of thing, together. We’re all dying. We’re all gonna die. Everyone we love is gonna die. We got that in common. It’s powerful. I wonder if there’s a baseline of that understanding in the book. It might allow the sorrow and the heartbreak and the devastation—there is something when we are not alone in our devastation, when we’re not alone in our heartbreak, that changes the tenor of the heartbreak. You know that. You know that when you go through something with someone else, it’s a little bit more tolerable because you help each other. I’ve been thinking lately about how there’s many feelings of connection. We can feel very connected by sorrow, but delight, delight is the pleasurable evidence of our connection. The bottom line of this book is that it’s about connection. It’s not about isolation. It’s not This happened to me and only me. It’s about connection first.