Poet and essayist Ross Gay visited the Ann Arbor campus on Dec. 7 Zell Visiting Writers Series, reading on Thursday from his book-length poem “Be Holding” and on Friday from his recently published essay collection, “The Book of (More) Delights.”
To say it plainly, Ross Gay exudes delight. My last name is Sun, so believe me when I say I’ve heard my fair share of people comparing me to a beam of sunshine. But none of the people I’ve met have come close to matching Gay’s energy. He spoke with such passion and joy, like a fun uncle who gets carried away on long tangents, but makes it so much fun that you don’t mind at all — in fact, you welcome the digression. Gay is the kind of author who you’d fantasize about becoming friends with.
I digress, which incidentally, was the point of the first essay Gay read, (Foot-End-Etc.) Notes: “I have lately been writing long footnotes myself — way too long, believe me — in an effort, I realized as they were accruing, to do that thing we do in conversation, which is interrupt ourselves, or interject — oh yeah hold up you need to know this, too — such that, in the best conversations, the ones I love, visiting is the word, you sometimes go as deep as you do far.”
I, too, love footnotes. Footnotes invite the reader in and show them all that happened in the process of writing, allowing readers to be part of the process too. Perhaps it discusses an important consideration you had to make or tells a funny insight, much like bloopers. Or maybe it simply provides additional information and context to those readers who want or otherwise need it, which in a way makes the text more accessible to more people. As Gay said during the Q&A, “The most interesting things aren’t going to be interesting to everyone.” Surely, that doesn’t mean it should get cut: Instead, why not welcome readers in with endearing footnotes (a “footnote” here — not just footnotes! Other notes included! Gay, for instance, has a particular love for acknowledgments. See his essay above), which can make readers feel like they’re visiting the author (“visiting” being Gay’s word for the kind of hanging out with no discernible goal, enjoyment being the only purpose).
The other day, I saw an Instagram ad for an article titled something like, “Why you can’t relax even when you want to,” which was ironic given where I found it — you mean, because scrolling for hours for dopamine isn’t relaxing? Nevertheless, my reader, I understand that for people with our affliction — by which I mean busy, driven college students with everything to do — the prospect of spending time suboptimally (such as sifting through footnotes) sounds like a nightmare!
It’s true that footnotes aren’t conducive to efficiency, which incidentally, was also a recurring theme during Gay’s visit. During the Q&A, someone asked about efficiency, since it came up in the reading of his poem, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” He said, “There’s some mode often when we’re on these stages, or doing a thing, that we’re supposed to be really efficient, like silence is like a kind of danger, or like stumbling around, and not knowing, and all of those things which are things that actually make us creatures — we’re not supposed to do that.”
But why do we always feel the need to be as efficient as we can? And commonly, the motivation for being efficient, i.e. productive, is not self-serving. I can understand completing tasks as a source of self-fulfillment, but that’s only if there’s an internal desire to do the work, which is why, these days, efficiency seems more like a necessity for self-preservation.
In his comment for the October 2022 issue of Poetry magazine, “Out of Time (Time: The Fourth Incitement.’’ Ross brings up W.H. Auden’s famous quote “poetry makes nothing happen,” which is usually taken to mean that poetry is useless1. Ross says what Auden really meant is that poetry makes “nothing” happen. That quiet, timeless2 enjoyment of nothingness, that which is killed by maniacal productivity, is what poetry brings back.
To prove this to you, my favorite moments of the reading were the footnotes. It was when Gay went into the backstories behind the poems — the lore, as the kids call it. He told us about a hilarious 30-second opera experiment which somehow also involved digging puppets out of the garbage and standing on the table — this was in his poetry class, by the way — and the completely amateurish, painstakingly slow trudge process of opening a community orchard, which, again, was about reveling in inefficiency. The footnotes were his overwhelming love for notebooks which he admits is “really a little silly.” And they were his many digressions into the interactions among him and his seventh-grade teacher, his basketball coach, the role of disobedience in education, impostor syndrome and more.
These stories were not the poems. Strictly speaking, one might imagine an efficient poetry reading would consist of the poet coming on stage, reading whatever poems they’d prepared and fucking off back to their hotel, possibly with a book signing to promote sales. But of course, that’s absurd! The stories are the poems as well. The digressions are themselves the stories. The point is to digress, and the poems are digressions.
Digressions are good in part because when we digress, we begin stumbling onto unknown territory. The piece begins to go in a direction you hadn’t anticipated it going before. In the Q&A after the first evening’s reading, Gay said that the point of writing an essay is to do exactly this because only when you do something unknown to you can you discover something new, to “unknow ourselves, again and again and again and again — which is inefficient!” Then, when you’re done writing the essay, you leave it for someone else to read and stumble through.
Unsurprisingly, this is often not the position taken by school-assigned essays. Instead of following an inquiry, most school papers ask you to first write the thesis and then defend it with arguments. But as Gay said, “If you know the thesis, well then fuck it! You know it!”
I still sometimes fall into the trap of (metaphorically speaking) putting the idea at the forefront of an essay and writing as if I’m trying to convince the reader that I’m right. And maybe sometimes I am! Maybe sometimes, there’s something I know so clearly and need to express so certainly that there’s no choice but to write argumentatively. But most of the time, if I sit down to spew my already-formed thesis, I quickly realize that I was wrong. The key, I found, is that when I’m contemplating which essay to write, instead of thinking “What do I want to write about?” It’s better to think, “What do I want to know more about?” Though when I start on the right foot, or change my direction to follow this new inquiry, I might turn out to be wrong again! Even when I think I’m finally right, inevitably, I’m wrong.
In a school paper, you’re typically supposed to end with some static conclusion — or worse yet, make up some obligatory bullshit about how it’s “complex” or “nuanced” and move on. But in a real essay or poem, all you can do is get it to some close enough approximation of the truth before you send it to the editors3.
Errors, revisions, delightful tangents. These are all things that make a piece of writing sound more authentic. A writer’s voice is often just that — a unique combination of these things that make their writing unmistakably theirs. Which is to say, when you sift through someone’s notes — scrap ideas, footnotes, acknowledgments, forewords, etc. — and you feel that you’re getting an inkling of what was in their brain as they wrote the thing, you feel the world as someone else feels it.
And what is more important than that?
Daily Arts Contributor Kenneth Sun can be reached at sunken@umich.edu.
- Often by haters of poetry, but even more often by defenders of poetry who anticipate the attack and twist it into a point of praise. There’s a similar phenomenon for anything that doesn’t visibly contribute to the GDP – even math! – which I’ve talked about here ↩︎
- This semester, I learned that timeless (pleasant), and timeless (way too long) are two very different feelings. ↩︎
- Another pressure that footnotes resist is the pressure to produce something “finished.” One of the lessons my poetry professor tried to hammer into us this past semester was that “a poem is never finished, just abandoned.” Or as Ross Gay says, “I just don’t believe I’m to the bottom of it… of anything!” And I think that extends to other forms of writing, as well, and indeed to many undertakings even outside it. ↩︎