Good morning.
Just weeks ago I was in the pull of spring’s existential tide, and now the full wave of summer has crested. Kidding season is over. The beehives are stacked. The first hay is cut and baled. So much has happened.
It started with an incredible shit sandwich of a week. We have had the good fortune of very few goat deaths during kidding over the years. This year balanced the scales: two difficult goat births with breech kids—two of the five kids survived. We were up late in the night with arms in shoulder-length surgical gloves, reaching into screaming does trying to help remove their dead and dying kids. Afterwards we put them on penicillin because they were retaining their placentas. I syringe fed them and tried to palpate their bellies to get the placentas to detach and pass. One of them coughed up the liquid nutrient I was feeding her. I scrubbed it out of my shirt and hung it to dry outside. Clipping weathered wooden clothespins on an old t-shirt in the sun—a quiet moment that felt so disconnected from what was happening behind me in the barn. The older doe was one of the first three we bought when we moved to the farm. I learned how to milk by hand after she had her first set of kids that spring.
The next morning we found both does dead in their stalls.
After preschool drop-off and nap time for the two-year-old, we buried the goats under the elm trees on the east side of the barnyard. The branches are all trimmed to goat height where they have nibbled the leaves and twigs off as high as they can reach.
That same week, we planted roses while it hailed on and off throughout the afternoon. Everything suffers a little or a lot in spring. You'll see something real on the land and it changes you. All of the things we are doing seem so important and unimportant at the same time. Sometimes I look around the farm and see all the unfinished things, all the things that didn’t turn out, all the attempts that fell short, and it brings me a wild and unkempt happiness. My favorite project is an unfinished one—full of potential which is infinite and soothing. I like to see the rafters. I like the uncovered pine boards. I like the defeated beauty of a flat tire. In the incompleteness, there are no illusions that I’m any good at this, and that soft, diffident place is a comfort to me. I won't try to defend it. It makes me feel like myself, and how many times do we have to be truly ourselves? The silent and beautiful things you do that are you. An unfinished crossword puzzle we find at a coffee shop and fill in what we can until it’s time to go.
Ross Gay
On how we care for each other
At one minute after 10am the Zoom screen blinked to life and there he was—Ross Gay smiling and saying hello to me from his bright, clean, Monday morning kitchen. The National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet and New York Times best-selling author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and the nearly ubiquitous The Book of Delights has been busy. This spring he began a book tour and has been featured on NPR and podcasts galore. We spoke on a sunny Memorial Day morning and got right down to it.
Gay writes poems about budging movement in the impasse between fathers and sons; about stopping to eat fruit from a tree in his neighborhood; about life-changing basketball moves; about serving breakfast and philosophy to a now-dead friend. And always, he delivers something honest and universal.
Writers have their haunts. Their recurring themes. The deep and abiding questions they are compelled to explore. For Gay, the ways we care for each other make up the questions he doesn’t tire of. “A friend of mine says whatever you call a recurring theme is how we make things out of the discards. My question, lately, is an analogous one,” he told me.
“I’m interested in how we care for each other—especially ways that don’t get regarded or understood as care. The way I think about pickup basketball, for example. It’s a site of care. It gets messy because it’s people. It’s a site where the rules of the game, which are always changing, are actually trying to facilitate us playing the game. I’m looking out for that.”
He doesn’t take basketball lightly. His book-length poem Be Holding is an entire love song to Julius Erving—Dr. J.—and the baseline reverse layup he made (invented!) in Game 4 of the 1980 NBA finals. But it is the male sensitivity within basketball, and not traditional male strength, that Gay hones in on. “I am interested in how men tend to each other—and how men tend, period,” he said.
“There’s a version of masculinity that is a deadly fantasy, that imagines a kind of needlessness. To be without needs is a proper man. To be without needs, your feelings can’t get hurt. I understand that. I’ve been trained up in that. I feel like that’s a thing that gets brought up in a certain kind of culture.”
He wants to encounter the ways that disprove that fantasy—like when men express need for one another, or even say thank you to each other. Gay says that without need, gratitude doesn’t exist. “That’s one of the sorrows of ‘self-sufficient’ men,” he told me. “They can’t be grateful because they imagine themselves without need. You have to acknowledge your need. You need everything. Start with the lungs, start with air.”
There is the pop culture version of gratitude, and then there is Gay’s more dimensional and humanistic approach. His poetry and essays can feel like taking a deep breath. I asked him how that began, and why he thought poetry was the result. “I have no idea,” he said.
“I could say my sophomore year of college, blah blah, Amiri Baraka changed my life, etc.—but then I think about, oh, what did it mean to grow up in an apartment complex with kids and people that talked differently? My mom is from Minnesota and my dad is from Ohio. They had different manners of thinking and acting. I was deep into music. That had something to do with it. I was reading lyrics closely all the time. The performative aspect of [basketball] is interesting to me. When I think of myself as a poet, I’m not only thinking about on that page, but also readings and stuff, and that’s from sports. That’s performative, being on teams, the perpetual collaboration. When I write my poems, I think of myself as always collaborating with other writers. When did you first start writing poems? There’s a million answers. It’s a great question because all these things contribute to it.”
Poetry and pickup basketball were on his mind. He told me he plans to be writing more about it soon. The things that are built into both poems and pickup, and the possibilities that each contain, hold beauty, he says. “Someone is going to win, but you always have the chance to get back on the court,” he explained.
“Maybe it makes more sense to get rid of one aspect of the competitiveness—let’s just play four minute games and get rid of winning. There’s always another way to play. I think real basketball is pickup basketball, where people are organzing themselves on the court. It is like a poem—a formal way to foment beauty. Pickup isn’t about domination, no one owns the game. Whereas a ref and judges, all that stuff, that’s more potential for that kind of thing. Pickup at its best is to come together and make beautiful shit.”
As for what he writes about and what comes out on a page, Gay says he is usually recounting something or reencountering it. “The thing I love about writing poems is that I get to spend time with an experience in a different way,” he said.
“Putting my memory into form or language, I start to kind of un-know and re-know things that I thought I knew firmly. I’ve been learning that so much lately. Part of the pleasure to me is reencountering stuff I feel familiar with. It feels like a kind of magic— a kind of magic you can induce. It feels like what is familiar, what is my past, becomes less grounded. In my non-fiction, too, I would feel like so often I’m going to go write an essay about this thing, and in the process of writing the essay, I would re-know that thing. I don’t know what you call it—it is part recall, part, you know, conjure, and it’s a lot of luck. When a neat line comes together, I feel like, ooh, how lucky was that, it’s all about the way the light was coming in the window. I’m trying to write shit that makes me feel like that.”
I couldn’t resist asking him what he writes with. I wanted to know if pens are important to him—kind of like how musicians are interested in amps and mics. Writers have their setups, too. “What you write with is crucial,” Gay said.
“[All of the essays in] The Book of Delights, I wrote by hand. I write my poems by hand, too. I don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s something about the way we express with our bodies that is less mediated than with a computer, which is more mediated. Writing by hand, I’m scratching stuff out, making notes—I’m creating an archaeological site. These pages are interesting and beautiful documents. The computer wants or encourages us to delete the archive of our thinking. The older I get, the more interested I am in not the great thing, but the way I mumbled toward a thought. I love notebooks.”
Before we said goodbye, Gay returned to the genesis of a poet.
“It would be neat to look at the art and music I was listening to when I was a kid. How did this love of words become? Was it a movie I saw or a moment in a game or something my dad said in a moment of tenderness? A teacher who was kind? Ultimately, I’m interested in the ways we inhabit being creatures—how we change as we live and move toward dying, how we become something else along the way. I don’t want to be fixed. I want to practice and honor that—the fact that we all change.”
He looked out toward the window in his kitchen. A sign hung above the sink with Okra: the people’s vegetable printed on it. A moment passed, then he looked back at the screen.
“I suspect I’ll be tangling with this until I die.”
Some Things I Consumed This Past Fortnight
Fresh asparagus. Our 40-crown patch is good and mature now, going on seven or eight years old. This year the stalks are sprouting up thick and sweet, a reminder of the stack of years we have spent here.
A good long drive in the Vanagon. We took a trip to the Driftless and blew off all the cobwebs, visited the Kickapoo Nature Reserve, and spent a few days in Viroqua, WI.—site of America’s most enchanting bookstore.
Love Me Tender, the shocking autobiographical account of Constance Debré’s forced separation from her son after she came out as a lesbian and left her husband. The reckless sexual lifestyle she adopts runs parallel to the pain and panic of being forbidden from seeing her 7-year-old son for over two years.
Swims in the St. Croix river.
Prairie blooms:
Flexible brake line and crush washers for the farm truck. A leak had sprung.
Some time wrenching on farm machinery. The haybine, the rake, and the tractor all acted up during the week we cut hay. While this definitely complicated things, I have to admit that I deeply enjoy rolling my sleeves up and tinkering with old equipment. A new pick-up bar bushing, a thermostat replacement, and a wheel gear adjustment had everything back to operational capacity.
And it all worked out just in the nick of time.
A first, lusty cut of hay.
Have a great Sunday, and thanks for reading.
Cheers,
Jake
*special thanks to my friend Meredith for help prepping questions to ask Ross Gay.