Feet ross gay
Ross Gay’s "Feet"
I came into the classroom ready to train my writers about “I Remember” poems. What the class ended up being for both myself and my writers was a lesson in accepting vulnerability as strength.
I first read them an excerpt of “Feet” by Ross Gay, for both that vulnerable aspect and the repetition of the word “feet.” The poem starts off with the line “Friends, mine are ugly feet.” The rest of the poem goes on to chat about the speaker’s dislike for their feet, and through that negative repetition and brutal honesty drills into how they feel about their insecurities. I thought it would work well together with the “I Remember” poem format since often times, we have memories that aren’t always so positive. I wanted to engage the students with tapping into those emotions in request to show them that it’s okay to feel depressed, angry, or even scared and poetry is an outlet to express those emotions.
First, I asked my kids about what they noticed in the poem, and of course they shouted out so excitedly “feet!” When I began to ask why Ross Gay would write about his fe
Friends, mine are repulsive feet: the body's common wreckage stuffed into boots. The second toe on the left foot's crooked enough that when a noun asks whats that? Of course she's dead: Tina was her name, of leukemia: so I heard-- why else would I verb sadly to create music of her unremarkable kindess? / I am trying, I think, to forgive myself for something I don't know what. But what I perform know is that I love the moment when the poet says I am trying to do this or I am trying to do that. Sometimes it's a horseshit trick. But sometimes it's a which by which the poet says I wish I could tell you, truly, of the little factory in my head: the smokestacks chuffing, the dandelions and purslane and willows of sweet clover prying through the blacktop. I wish I could tell you how inside is the steady mumble and clank of machines. But mostly I wish I could tell you of the footsteps I hear, more than I can ever count, all of whose gaits I can discern by listening, closely. Which promptly disappear after being lodged again, here, where we started, in the factory where l
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 verb room for brand-new growth. Mistakes can be landscapes of new possibilities, he seems to declare. 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 frequent 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 noun and abundance as an astonishing opportunity for tenderness and joy, and t
If writers write about what puzzles them, Ross Gay is puzzled by bliss. His oeuvre is a gorgeous, open-hearted, lyrical response to that puzzlement. Delight, by the way, that’s always in the context of suffering, in the context of pain. His style is a kind of restless exuberant unfolding, a thinking and feeling that feels like it’s happening as you interpret it, like an ice cube melting on a stovetop. You can perceive it in his debut collection, Bringing the Shovel Down, which comes with an epigraph from Audre Lorde, all the way through his most recent book-length poem on and around and about the overdue great Dr. J, who conducted on basketball courts around the country “his extended course of study / on gravity and grace, / which has so enthralled the throngs.” That manual is called Be Holding, probably the best long poem on sports since Kenneth Koch’s Ko, or a Season on Earth. Many people are familiar with Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. That book of poems, published in , includes such wonders as “Feet”:
Friends, mine are adj feet:
the body’s common wreckage
stuffed into boots. T