In Talk With Ross Gay
Will San Jose ‘22
Greens Farms Academy’s latest visiting writer, Ross Gay, teaches poetry and studies joy, though only technically. After a conversation with Gay, it was clear that he is much more than a teacher of just poetry, and much more than a student of just joy.
“One of the things that writing is for me is an opportunity to really deeply interrogate language,” he said. “A brutal way of going through the world is as a fixed thing. But what I’m trying to do in my writing—or want to be trying to do in my writing—is to unfix myself, and to actually be something that is changing.”
As such, joy is only one example of the language that Gay works to interrogate.
“After I wrote my third book, which is called Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, I feel like in a way I got thrust into a conversation about joy, because people were responding to this book and using the word ‘joy,’” he said. “I think the word ‘joy’ probably shows up a few times in that book, but probably it shows up in ways that I don’t actually think of joy right now. So I don’t think that I had the same perspective or the same approximate and always-emerging definition of joy then that I have now. I think it was other people saying ‘this is a book about joy’ that made me think ‘oh, what is joy?’”
Since Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Gay has published the essay collection The Book of Delights and the epic poem Be Holding. In these works, Gay continues his inquiry into joy that began after Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Despite their discussion of subjects like race and death, Gay maintains that these books are still about joy.
“The harsh constitutes the joy,” he says. “The joy emerges from enduring the sorrow.”
Through his continuous study of language such as joy, Gay also teaches at Indiana University. Although the subject of his classes is poetry, Gay aims to teach more than just a form of writing.
“I just want us to practice sharing,” he said. “In my class, we’re constantly doing collaborative projects, we’re constantly interviewing each other. At least half of what we do requires that we do it together. And that’s what I want my classes to be.”
Gay’s teaching and writing could be tied together in a number of ways, whether it be the category of relationships, togetherness, joy, or sorrow. In his own words, however, it is something different which all of it fits into.
“I’ve been trying to—whatever the word is—understand or care for or deal with my mind,” he said. “In a way I’m curious about the mind.”
