^B00:00:13 >> Charlotte Harper: Everyone welcome. Thank you so much for coming. We really appreciate you coming out. Who knew it was going to rain? I didn't. But you all did, because you all have umbrellas. Anyway, thank you for coming. I'm Charlotte Harper. I'm the director of programming here at Hill Center. For how many of you is this your first time at Hill Center? That's great. We love having events that bring in new people, and it seems like this series, Life of a Poet, with Ron Charles, is one of those series. We are so happy to have Ron and the Library of Congress partner with us on this series. We could not, obviously, do this without them. We are thrilled, and we are thrilled today to welcome Ross Gay and can't wait to hear about his work. And by the way, his work is being sold out here on the right-hand side by East City Bookshop, a nice local bookshop, women owned and operated. Yes. But right now, ID like to turn it over to Rob Casper, the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at Library of Congress. So, give it up. ^M00:01:12 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:17 >> Rob Casper: Hi everyone. Thanks for coming out. I'm curious how many people came last week too? Wow, check you out. This weather is marginally better than--yeah, me too. Marginally better than last week, but we hope you continue to come to the series as we do rain or shine. All right. I want to thank Charlotte and everyone here at the Hill Center for making this series possible. It's wonderful to be back here in this great room with all of you tonight. I also want to thank The Washington Post and my personal hero, Ron Charles. You know, two of these conversations is a lot to take on in one week, but-- >> Ron Charles: I was happy to do it. >> Rob Casper: And we're happy to have you here, making it possible. Before I say anything more, I just want to tell you a little bit about the poetry and literature center at the Library of Congress. We are home to the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry and in fact our poet laureate, Tracy K. Smith, will be giving her closing event on April 15, April 15, yeah. So you should come check her out down the street at the Jefferson building. We also host a range of programs. We'll have all sorts of programs between now and April 15 over at the Library's Capitol Hill campus. If you want to find out more about the Library, you should visit our website, www.loc.gov/poetry. And we would really also love to know what you think about tonight's program. On your seats, there should be some surveys. If you could fill them out, you can leave them on the chairs afterwards. You can hand them to me. We want to make sure to get them and find out what we can do better going forward. Though with Ron there's not much we can do. >> Ron Charles: I filled most of them out already. >> Rob Casper: He said why does that introducer go on so long. So, [inaudible] kicked off our spring series last week. We're thrilled to have Ross Gay here to end it a week later. If only winter was as short. Ross Gay is the author of three books, Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015, National Book Critic Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tuft's Award. Indeed. He is also the founding editor of the online sports magazine, Some Call it Ballin', and an editor of the Chapbook Press's Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. He is as well a founding board member of the Bloomington Community orchard, a nonprofit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project, which is a great description. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University in Bloomington where he lives. Of all the poets we have featured in this series, Ross Gay has arguably been the most anticipated. This is partly due to the fact that our dear Ron Charles served on the committee that awarded Gay his National Book Critic Circle award for Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude just a few years ago. The Washington Post, and not Ron, but Elizabeth Blunt called Catalog, "A charming collection that gives readers permission to feel joyful. Losses, small slights, and large issues such as prejudice and violence also appear, yet the speaker always tries to translate everything back into the original language of possibility." Ron had the opportunity to meet our future poet at the prize ceremony in New York and hear him read, and I believe he's been smitten ever since. I too have been struck by Ross Gay's poems, which NPR says, "burst forth in leggy, unexpected ways, zooming in on legs furred with pollen or soiled breasts stroking into the xylem." [laughter] Tess Taylor had a lot more fun than [inaudible] that description. >> Ron Charles: I didn't edit that. >> Rob Casper: Though Ross and I have never met, and I've never heard him read, I'll never forget the day I read Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude cover to cover. I was staying with friends down in Austin, and I woke up one morning to glorious sunlight pouring through the blinds of my friend's office. In the course of getting up, my eye caught Gay's third collection with its stunning cover art by Arista Alanis sitting atop a pile of books. It's right here. I thought to myself, this has been getting a lot of play, and picked it up with the intent to simply leaf through and then head to the kitchen for breakfast. Well let me tell you, I did not leave that room until I'd gone from To the Fig Tree on Ninth and Christian straight through to Last Will and Testament, and I was good and full of poetry. The same could be said of what we're about to experience right now, and I'll bet you too won't ever forget the magic of this moment. Please join me in welcoming Ron Charles with Ross Gay. ^M00:06:26 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:35 >> Ron Charles: I am delighted you're here. >> Ross Gay: Thank you, same here. And we get him first, you know. His new book comes out next Tuesday, and here is the Book of Delights, and it is delightful. It's not poetry. It's a selection of brief essays that he said he wrote because the more you study delights, the more delight there is to study. My delight grows when I share it. You will want to get this, read it, and feel the delight and the joy. In the middle of this piece, I'm reading along, you know, enjoying them all, and at number 64, it's about poetry readings. So I got to read, I got to read from this again, but I did want him to read a bit of this first essay to start us off, if you would. >> Ross Gay: Totally. It's called, this title was so hard to get right. We really tried on this. It's called, number 64, fishing an eyelash, two or three cents on the virtues of the poetry readings. It might be a kind of self-aggrandizement to say so, but I love poetry readings. I love going to them. I think I love them, I probably love them most often more than I love poetry books. I'm pretty sure this is true. The reason is simple. Because during a poetry reading, you're watching someone communicate with their body, which is at it communicates in the process of fading away. It will, perhaps one day soon, be dead I mean. It sounds necrophilic, I know, but it's not exactly. Because the fact of the dying, which too you and I will do, and which books will not, reminds us that the performing body, the reading body, the living body, the body fiddling with the reading lamp on the podium or playing with the hem of her dress or keeping beat on the microphone like Whitney Houston used to, looking in the corners of the room, the occasional sparkling line of spit between his lips, the armpit of their T-shirt damp, pointing to the giraffe in their poem, all of it is illustrious. >> Ron Charles: Nice. ^M00:08:34 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:40 There's a charming disruptive self-consciousness in some of your poems when you suddenly speak directly to us about the very act of writing poems, if you know what I'm talking about. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, yeah. In one poem you speak of burning the world down to rebuild it, and then you stop and admit, well that sounds like a bullshit poem in the making. [laughter] >> Ross Gay: That's right, yeah. >> Ron Charles: And then, in a poem called Come On, you describe your mother's hands as the claws of a crab, and then you stop and say, that's one of those poetry lies. What are the hallmarks of a bullshit poem, and what are poetry lies? >> Ross Gay: That's a good question. You know, maybe a great story that I will tell is that my friend Evie was talking about this poem where I say something like that in the New Book, a poem called Fee, and I said something about, you know, I love it when a poem says I'm trying to do this, or I'm trying to do that. Sometimes it's a horseshit trick. But sometimes, and I sort of, I think the poem needs to say, but sometimes like what I'm doing, it's not. And Evie was like, sometimes I think that's a horseshit trick. So, anyway, what was your question? >> Ron Charles: So what are, what all right the hallmarks of a bullshit poem? >> Ross Gay: Oh, yeah. God, I don't know. But I know in myself, like there are moments where I'm trying to sort of just do, do a poemy thing, you know. >> Ron Charles: A poemy thing? >> Ross Gay: Yeah, I'm trying to do a poemy thing, and it's like, you know, sometimes it's a real, honest attempt to get at some sort of genuine feeling or something like that, and sometimes I'm imitating the idea of what a poem feels like somewhere. I think something like that. >> Ron Charles: You're acting like a poet. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like and I catch myself periodically, like in that one where I'm, whatever I said about my mom, and I'm like, eh, that's bullshit, you know. So, and I think it's kind of fun to like leave it in there sometimes too and be like-- >> Ron Charles: Yes. So we see the poem in the process of becoming itself. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: It's great fun. You teach poetry? >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: You must see a lot of bullshit poems. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean no more from my students than from myself though, to be perfectly honest. >> Ron Charles: I want you to read a poem called To the Mistake, in your new collection. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Which is called Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. To the Mistake. >> Ross Gay: To the Mistake. It is good to know a thing or two about that of which you speak, or even to be expert, which is not requisite though. A thing or two is good, like the prop plane I know is going to land on the canvas roof of my friend's rickety jeep, while the salutatorian to be sits in the back seat giddy with her new graphing calculator. And the driver says something I think about Arsenio Hall, and he sounds like a bunny. So, I don't know how to do this poem really. >> Ron Charles: What are you doing? [laughter] You can just read the poem, then we can talk about it. >> Ross Gay: I know, I know. If it's better to tell you before. So the story is that I made the error of like taking acid right before this reunion for the gifted class. >> Ron Charles: You'll get to that in the poem. >> Ross Gay: I know, I know, I know. But I don't, I don't want you to miss it. All right. You know the poem then. Just joking, just joking. So, while the salutatorian to be sits in the back seat giddy with her new graphing calculator, and the driver says something, I think, about Arsenio Hall, and he sounds like a bunny in an echo chamber, but it's hard to hear with those propellers roaring above. And today, I am lecturing on the miracle of the mistake in a poem, that hiccup or weird gift that spirals or jettisons what's dull and landlocked into as yet untraversed, i.e., cosmic, I overuse this metaphor with my students, grounds. I tell this to 105 give or take undergrads who mostly don't care and wrestle second to second the by now blood-borne drive to check their beckoning phones, which mostly, bless them, they don't. The mistake, I say, is a gift. Don't be afraid. See what it teaches you about what the poem can be. I know of what I speak. Like the two tabs of very potent, evidently acid I drop, four hours before this reunion and graduation party of sorts for we, the gifted and talented, corn chips and Mr. Pibb and store-bought cookies, the texture of which sunk me knee deep in a dessert. I imagine I looked something like an opaque cloud that day when Mr. and Mrs. Simonoski, our brainy hosts and teachers guffawed acclamation, the tremendous bead of spit balancing on Mr. Simonoski's lip before a gust of air lifted it, and it drifted to the coarse fabric of his beard, all the spiny hairs of which seemed to screech like crickets. And no wonder I declined the invitation from the volleyball court, although I was a phys ed major. And beneath the white arcs, the ball painted in the sky, my classmates, Lisa and Eugene and Ick and Becky all looked a bit alien with craniums engorged slightly and spines compressed if not even serpentine, their limbs flailing about wildly like cuttlefish, speaking only in poly-slavics which must have made my breathy grunts all the more apish. Who knows where the poem will lead you. I tell them to let go their reigns and listen to the tongues half-wit brilliance, the corner of the mind made light by some accidental yoking of two impossibly joined things, one or two in the rear. I notice their eyes roll into the backs of their heads. And my plastic cup of root beer by now is spilling a bit while Mr. Simonoski laughs like a hyena, plunging its face in a ruptured gut and nothing has ever been as clear to me as the bell that rang in my head that day. We were a 12-year experiment. The garden variety brainiacs from a suburban school, passable genetic mixture, forgettable location, Mr. Sim's oddly large eyes and his long reptilian tail now making sense in the way someone with an electric can opener voice seemed always to be inside him, speaking when he spoke, now making sense as the night winds down and the last of the cake is served writhing with some fluorescent scrawl only I seem able to read while all the good-natured kids whose fingernails are chewed raw and jaws pulse who are so good, so very good, and soon will be hauled into the bottomless sky under which I stumble to see what direction they're coming from, and can I run. >> Wow. ^M00:15:36 [ Applause ] ^M00:15:42 >> Ron Charles: That is one of the most fun poems about writing a poem. >> Ross Gay: Oh, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: The miracle of the mistake in a poem, that hiccup or weird gift that spirals or jettisons what's dull and land locked. The mistake, I say, is a gift. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: What do you mean by that? >> Ross Gay: Here I would like to reference Patrick Rosow's [phonetic] essay, The Art of the Mistake. And, you know, really it feels to me like, so I'm going to talk about teaching, so much of my teaching and so much of my writing life, like when I'm discovering things, I feel like so often I'm doing something that really feels accidental. It feels like I bump into something, you know. So, the accident or the mistake is the thing that I never would have done, for whatever reason. I don't know how it gets there. Whatever, for whatever reason something happens, and it is more true or more like, you know, something is revealed in a way that I could not have sort of willed myself to do. Something like that. >> Ron Charles: And you want your students to become self-conscious of that process? >> Ross Gay: I want to sort of train all of us to, I mean when I'm talking to the Intro to Creative Writing Class, which is, you know, I just would be glad if they came every once in a while, you know. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Ross Gay: But like when I'm thinking about my, you know, further along students, I am thinking about how is it that we can allow ourselves or set up the conditions for ourselves to write things that we otherwise could not have explored so that our knowledge itself is not the sort of determining or predetermining sort of limit of what we can make, you know. So we know something, but then there's this other kind of knowing. And my hope as a teacher and as a whatever, someone who makes stuff, is that I'm able to sort of figure out how to bump into those other kinds of knowing, you know? >> Ron Charles: Yes, yeah. >> Ross Gay: Okay. >> Ron Charles: You describe the poetry-making process in a variety of ways. In one poem called The Opening, there's this gorgeous description of you pruning a peach tree. And you describe pruning away, pruning away, pruning away, until you say the air and the light and even a bird can flow through it. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: It seems to me you're talking about, among other things, editing a poem. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. That's totally right. That's all right, hey. >> Ron Charles: Not at all, not at all. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: In The Spoon, you write, I swear when I got into this poem I would convert this sorrow into some kind of honey with a little music that I can sometimes make with these scribbled artifacts of our desolation. Tell us about that. Converting sorrow into honey. >> Ross Gay: That poem is so like trying hard to make sense of something that doesn't make sense. >> Ron Charles: It says that in the poem. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, exactly, and-- >> Ron Charles: But I think many of your poems are making honey out of sorrow. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. I think that was a poem where I realized it more sort of profoundly than maybe in some other poems. And yeah, it occurred to me that often that the act of writing a poem, for me is to make sense of something that doesn't make sense, or maybe, I don't know, yeah, something like that, and it arrived in that poem, that sort of thing of like, oh, this is kind of what we do. This is kind of what we do, like try to organize or order or make beautiful what doesn't make sense, you know. >> Ron Charles: The honey sounds sweet, risk being saccharine, your poem is taking on some really, really tough, horrible issues. They are not sweet poems, generally. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: The scribbled artifacts of our desolation are really clear in some of these poems. Would you read a poem called For a Young Emergency Room Doctor? >> Ross Gay: Yeah. ^M00:19:34 ^M00:19:42 >> Ron Charles: Take the tab out. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. For a Young Emergency Room Doctor. Although this prayer should first dress the dead boy's wounds, nine gunshots, in and out, the spine pierced and wrecked enough to twist the head dangled backward, and before the body, the night through which the bullet chewed, and the latex sheathing the hands of the cops who dragged and dropped the boy on the gurney, last touch of this world gloved, and the heart's dirge, dwindling lament for spilled blood, lost love too, for the blankets of light wrapping him, jeweling the viscous liquid slicking his lips. It's for the living, for those who close the boy's eyes again and again. For whom salve is the wound's mend, the eased bleed, who tell the story while eating, who too die at the dying's rising pile. ^M00:20:39 ^M00:20:46 >> Ron Charles: Is this written from some personal experience? >> Ross Gay: Yeah, this is my best, you know, one of my best friend's is an ER doctor, and we were in, I was getting my PhD in English while he was in med school. So we were living together, and I was sort of with him while he was in training. So, you know, he was encountering all kinds of, you know, [inaudible]. >> Ron Charles: It's incredibly common for ER doctors. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, totally. >> Ron Charles: What city was this in? >> Ross Gay: Philly. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. I haven't read that poem in a long time. >> Ron Charles: Here's another poem called the Bullet in Its Hunger. It's number four. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. The Bullet in Its Hunger. The bullet in its hunger craves the womb of the body, the warmth from there. Begs always release from the chilly dumb chamber. Look at this one who's glee at escape was out shown only by the heavens above him. The night's even-keeled breath, all things thus far dreams from his cramped bunker. But now, the world. Let me be a ravenous diamond in it, he thinks, chewing through the milky jaw bone of this handsome 17-year-old. Of course, he would have loved to nestle amidst the brain's scintillant catacombs, which only for the boy's dumb luck slipped away, but this will do. The bullet does not, as the boy goes into shock, or as his best friend stutters, palming fluid wound, want to know the nature of the conflict, nor the sound of the shooter's mother in prayer, nor the shot child's future harmonies, the tracheostomy's muffled wheeze, threaded thru the pencil's whisper as the boy scrawls unscarred. No. The bullet, like you, simply craves the warmth of the body. Like you, only wants to die in someone's arms. >> Ron Charles: That's an incredibly unnerving poem. And paired with the other one, there's nothing as sweet or honey, nothing was transformed into honey in those poems. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: What inspires poems about that kind of endemic American violence? >> Ross Gay: I guess trying to figure out like some [inaudible] to think about what feels like such a profound failure of the imagination, you know. It just feels, you know, some way of talking about how this is, how this is even possible among, you know, like people who ostensively care for each other or can, you know-- >> Ron Charles: Like why it would become normal to lose 85 people a day to gun violence. >> Ross Gay: Exactly. It's just a thing. It's just what it is. It's, you know, it's, and you know, of course, you talk to, you know, it's fucking crazy. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> Ross Gay: It's fucking crazy. And I guess in a way the poem is just trying to be like, you know, I don't even know, like trying to just further sort of contend with the craziness. >> Ron Charles: Well, it upsets our apathy, I think. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: It's so creepy and unnerving that it forces us to content with this violence in a completely different and unsettling way. >> Ross Gay: Right, right, right. >> Ron Charles: A lot of the violence in your poems is linked to racism. In The Book of Delights, the essay collection that'll come out Tuesday, you write, I'm trying to remember the last day I have been reminded of the inconceivable violence black people have endured in this country. Innocence is an impossible state for black people in America who are by virtue of this country's fundamental beliefs always presumed guilty. And if you'd read this poem, Postcard. ^M00:25:10 ^M00:25:17 >> Ross Gay: Postcard. Lynching of an unidentified man, circa 1920. I don't want to read it. I can't. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> Ross Gay: Thank you. >> Ron Charles: Okay. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: How about Pulled Over on the Short Hills of New Jersey? >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. I can read that. >> Ron Charles: There was a display at the show at the portrait gallery. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Just went down. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Do you remember the name of the photographer? She took photos of lynchings and through some magic took out the bodies, and so all we're left with are these grinning white people looking at the cameras. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Absolutely unspeakably horrible. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Pulled Over In Short Hills of New Jersey at 8 a.m. It's the shivering, when rage grows hot as an army of red ants and forces the mind to quiet the body, the quakes emerge. Sometimes just the knees, but at worst, through the hips, chest, neck, until like a virus, slipping inside the lungs and pulse, every ounce of strength tapped to squeeze words from my taut lips, his eyes scanning my car's insides, my eyes, my license, and as I answer the questions, three, four, five times, my jaw tight as a vice, his hand massaging the gun butt, I imagine things I don't want to and inside beg this to end before the shiver catches my hands and he sees and something happens. ^M00:26:51 ^M00:27:01 >> Ron Charles: I have had you read these brutal poems. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Because we're about to talk about gratitude, and I want your audience to know that you have contended with the most horrible aspects of life and still somehow persist in joy. And it's the most remarkable thing about you. In some of your poems, we can see you moving back and forth between the light and horror in really surprising unsettling ways. Grief to joy. It's a signature maneuver in some of your poems. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Would you read Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt? >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Seven. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. I had such a nice time last night. I was reading at Villanova, and a couple of these, a couple students had read the book, and they were talking about this poem and they were, when they were talking to me, they were sort of like buttoning and unbuttoning. [laughter] It was great. Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning my Shirt. No one knew or at least I didn't know they knew--no. No one knew or at least I didn't know they knew what the thin disks threaded here on my shirt might give me in terms of joy. This is not something to be taken lightly. The gift of buttoning one's shirt, slowly top to bottom, or bottom to top or sometimes the buttons will be on the other side, and I am a woman that morning, slipping the glass through its slot. I tread differently that day, or some of it anyway. My conversations are different. And the car bombs slicing the air and the people in it for a quarter mile and the honey bee's legs furred with pollen mean another thing to me than on the other days, which too have been drizzled in this simplest of joys, in this world of spaceships and subatomic this and that, two, maybe three times a day some days, I have the distinct pleasure of slowly untethering the one side from the other, which is like unbuckling a stack of vertebrae with delicacy. For I must only use the tips of my fingers, with which I will one day close my mother's eyes. This is as delicate as we can be in this life, practicing like this, giving the raft of our hands to the clumsy spider and blowing soft until she lifts her damp heft and crawls off. We practice like this, pushing seed into the earth like this, first in the morning, then at night, we practice sliding the bones home. >> Wow. ^M00:29:33 [ Applause ] ^M00:29:38 >> Ron Charles: So lovely, and you hear that movement back and forth, and it's surprising each time, right. It starts so light, funny. This is not to be taken lightly, the pleasure of buttoning my shirt. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. And then, the car bomb suddenly slices the air. And those delicate fingers with the buttons are suddenly closing-- ^M00:29:56 ^M00:30:02 It's surprising, again and again. Would you read a poem called Feet? >> Ross Gay: Oh, yeah. >> Ron Charles: This also feels so light and funny. It's not just me. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. Feet. The things that you might need to know is that the Real World was a, maybe it is a show still on a MTV? >> Ron Charles: This looks like an MTV crowd. [laughter] >> They canceled it. >> Ross Gay: Oh, they cancel, okay thank you. >> Ron Charles: Thank you, young person. [laughter] >> Ross Gay: Thank you. Yeah. And the other one is Powerman and Iron Fist. So that's a comic book. Luke Cage is Powerman. Powerman and Iron Fist, that was what I read when I was a kid. Feet. Friends, mine are ugly feet. The body's common wreckage stuffed into boots. The second toe on the left foot is crooked enough that when a child asks what's that of it, I can without flinch or fear of doubt lie that a cow stepped on it, which maybe makes them fear cows, for which I repent. In love as I am with those philosophical beasts, who would never smash my feet nor sneer at them the way my mother does. We always bought you good shoes, honey, she says. You can't blame us for those things. And for this, and other--my mom has been in a crowd like when I've read that poem, and she loses her mind at that line. She like falls out of her seat laughing. And for this and other reasons, I have never indulged in the pleasure of flip flops, shy or ashamed, digging my toes like ten tiny ostriches into the sand at the beach with friends, who I'm not sure love me. Though I don't think Tina loved me. She liked me I think, but said to me, as we sat on lawn chairs beside a pool where I lifeguarded and was meticulous at obscuring from view with a book or towel my screwy friends, you have pretty feet. In that gaudy, cement mixer, Levittown accent that sends all the lemurs scaling my rib cage to see, and she actually had pretty feet. So I took this as a kindness, incomparable and probably fell a little bit in love with her for that afternoon, with the weird white streak in her hair and her machine gun chatter and her gums snapping, and so I slid my feet from beneath my Powerman and Iron Fist comic book into the sun for which they acted like plants, open their tiny mouths to the food hurtling to them through the solar system. And like plants, you could watch them almost smile, almost say thank you. You could watch them turn colors and be almost emboldened, none of which Tina saw, because she was probably digging in her purse, or talking about that hotty on the Real World or yelling at some friend's little sister to put her ass in her trunks or pouring the crumbs of her Fritos into her thrown open mouth, but do you really think I'm talking to you about my feet? Of course she's dead. Tina was her name, of leukemia, so I heard. Why else would I try sadly to make music of her unremarkable kindness? I'm trying, I think, to forgive myself for something, I don't know what. But what I do know is that I love the moment when the poet says I'm trying to do this or I'm trying to do that. Sometimes it's a horseshit trick, but sometimes it's a way 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 loss makes all things beautiful grow. ^M00:34:22 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:34:23 [ Applause ] ^M00:34:30 >> Ron Charles: Of course she's dead. How could you do that? Well I want you to answer that. How could you do that? >> Ross Gay: Do that? What's the that? >> Ron Charles: Of course she's dead. >> Ross Gay: Oh. >> Ron Charles: Catch us up like that. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Set us up like that. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: To be devastated like that. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. I think I'm talking to myself. Yeah. I'm talking to myself at that moment, like sort of realizing that, the way that memory, I think, I think. The way that memory gets sort of conjured out of that, that sense of like, oh, that, that person's not here anymore. Yeah, the sort of unremarkable kindness becomes really remarkable. >> Ron Charles: Sanctified. >> Ross Gay: Sanctified, yeah, totally, totally. >> Ron Charles: In the poem. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's probably, I'm realizing that in the course of writing it, like trying to, yeah, yeah. Something like that. >> Ron Charles: That little factory in your head, the factory where loss makes all things beautiful grow. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: That's the poetic function. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. Yeah. Now I don't think only loss makes beautiful things grow, but I think probably the fact of loss is always there with the beautiful things that are growing. You know, I think it's probably actually the truth, you know. Even the most abundant and ebullient sort of exaltative poem has loss around it, touching it. >> Ron Charles: It's honest, if it's honest. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, if it's honest, yeah totally, yeah. ^M00:36:22 ^M00:36:26 >> Ron Charles: We're all going to stand up, turn around, and sit back down. >> Ross Gay: Do you do this all the time? That's great. >> Ron Charles: Some of them expect it. Others are shocked. >> Ross Gay: That's great. >> Ron Charles: It's not an intermission, you can't leave. I mean you could leave. >> [Inaudible] no wine. >> Ron Charles: No. Okay, sit back down. >> Ross Gay: I love that. >> Ron Charles: I learned this from my wife, a high school teacher. >> Ross Gay: You have? >> Ron Charles: She said, people can't sit that long. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: You can't concentrate. >> Ross Gay: I'll take breaks before I read the long poem in there sometimes, but-- >> Ron Charles: Yeah [inaudible]. ^M00:36:55 [ Background Noise ] ^M00:37:00 We're halfway. [laughter] You've got a poem called Heaven, which is full of some really stark juxtapositions. >> Ross Gay: God yeah. >> Ron Charles: Remember this poem? ^M00:37:14 ^M00:37:18 >> Ross Gay: Oh, yeah. The Heaven. Huh. The Heaven. This is the heaven. Pig shit, tulips, a filthy child whose eyes are wide enough to bleed, and his four siblings, each hungry as him. Maybe, probably one will die from some disease that twists the air from his lungs. It will hurt. The heaven is pain inside and out, and love thick as ore. The heaven takes and takes, smirks. It is the weight sinking a burlap sack of kittens. The light warming. The silent wake. The mother. A backyard thick with bones. Plunge of thumb in the soil. Blood and teeth. Song like shrapnel. The heaven is this and more. Sun glancing off the gunwales' backs and the vulture's weight. The creases in a man's face when he enters into prayer. The way his words turn into a shroud of light. A conversation between a man and an idea I can almost see, I can almost believe. I haven't read that poem in years. >> Ron Charles: It's beautiful and difficult in many ways. Emotionally difficult, theologically challenging. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Heaven is the light of the wake. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Can you read it again? >> Ross Gay: Yeah. This is the heaven. Pig shit, tulips, a filthy child whose eyes are wide enough to bleed, and his four siblings, each hungry as him. Maybe, probably one will die from some disease that twists the air from his lungs. It will hurt. The heaven is pain inside and out and love thick as ore. The heaven takes and takes, smirks, is the weight sinking a burlap sack of kittens. The light warming the silent wake. The mother. A backyard thick with bones. Plunge of thumb in the soil. Blood and teeth. Song like shrapnel. The heaven is this and more. Sun glancing off the gunwales' backs and the vultures' weight. The creases in a man's face when he enters into prayer. The way his words turn into a shroud of light. A conversation between a man and an idea, I can almost see. I can almost believe. Hum. ^M00:40:03 [ Applause ] ^M00:40:08 ^M00:40:12 >> Ron Charles: It's a poem reaching for a sort of complexity and an encapsulation of different things that you can't really contain. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, it's sort of, I'm trying to think like what I was thinking about or, but it's clear that in some way the poem wants to be like, you know, the whole thing is the heaven, that's the, there's a theological sort of, it's like the whole thing. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Ross Gay: But that turn at the end, like that conversation between a man and idea, I can almost see. Yeah, it's interesting to me. ^M00:40:55 ^M00:40:59 Yeah, I haven't read, I haven't looked at that poem for years. It's amazing. >> Ron Charles: So many of your poems are about the persistence of life, what you call the florid burden of living. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Rob Casper: The florid burden of living. Could you read a poem called Man Tries to Commit Suicide with a Crossbow. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. Yeah, like looking at this poem it's, I mean it's-- >> Ron Charles: Wow. >> Ross Gay: It's this-- >> Ron Charles: Listen to this. >> Ross Gay: Oh yeah. >> Ron Charles: It's so gruesome. The man doesn't die, I'll just ruin it for you now, which is almost worse. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, man tries to committee suicide with a crossbow for Thomas Lux. And that's the first line. Man tries to commit suicide with a crossbow and fails. First, imagine the weapon pointing heavenward beneath his chin. After the trigger's quick tick, the following. What for said undead must have sounded like a rocket's stratospheric crash, which is to say the arrow just crested the crown, i.e., it got stuck. At which point the head, now a kabob, said undead had the wherewithal to unscrew the skewer from the little lodged missile and pull it out, to walk to the emergency room. I love to think grace takes strange shapes. The arrow bond to the howl of neurons. To think of that walk beneath the velvet night. Stay with me. Don't think headache. Think instead the star's ancient light warming his just budding horn. ^M00:42:47 [ Applause ] ^M00:42:51 Crazy. That's actually one of the stories that my buddy came home with. You know, I don't think he had treated that person, but I think it was-- >> Ron Charles: Heard about it. >> Ross Gay: He had heard about it. You know, it's so, it's interesting to me to look at that poem and then say to look at that heaven poem and to look at, you know, so many of the poems that my obsessions have not changed, you know. It's like damn, that's the same poem, different syntax. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Ross Gay: You know. >> Ron Charles: It's so gory it's funny. I mean it's hard not to laugh even though we're horrified. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: And then the line about grace taking strange shapes and the light of heaven shining on his budding horn. I mean it really does force us to imagine grace amidst horror. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, I mean I think it wants to be like, I hope he's okay. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Ross Gay: You know, here's his whole thing. Like that's, that's like really trying. I hope he's okay, you know. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Ross Gay: Pain. I haven't read that in a long time either. >> Ron Charles: I love that poem. Do any of you know Thomas Lux's poems? Uh-huh, yeah. He died recently. And I'm sort of, he was really my teacher, one of my teachers, and I hear him in that. So he just came in the room. >> Ron Charles: Outside the Wake of a Friend's Father. It's another poem where the feelings and the themes are not at war with one another but definitely in conflict. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, they're at, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, in one of these delights, I say something about, because I have a mind of death, da da da da da, and like all these poems it's like, yeah. I wasn't lying. >> Ron Charles: If you just had a mind of death-- >> Ross Gay: I know, I know. That'd be a bummer. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. [laughter] >> Ross Gay: That'd be a bullshit poem. >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> Ross Gay: Outside the Wake of a Friend's Father. Although I know I should be trying hard to palpate this common sorry, to unspool sympathy for the bereaved, stumbling and sobbing inside those doors, my tongue sits like a stone in my mouth, and the truth's matter is, I am right now contemplating the mysteries of light on an ankle. That one, in particular, which beneath this sun favors the Earth's lush shape from the an airplane. And it might be the dogwood abloom, like a gaggle of screaming angels makes me dumb or the wrenched gut slight of hand, but that ankle has put death to bed and has me dreaming of the lucky saint whose tongue transcribes channeled [phonetic] fragments throughout the minute ravines there. And I know I should stop, except I hear my own father's dust at this moment whispering in a breeze. No, no, go on. So let me sing the largest praise upon the subtlest juncture of flesh and bone, bony bud, the pillow upon which scripture was dreamt and writ, mother of the muses in their gowns flowing just above their ankles, and the sun's hot mouth breathing on me in dress pants, afraid to enter the parlor for my own wound lying in that casket, rubs also its lips along that miniscule mountain of motility. Crossroads of the foot's baroque architecture and the girder of the shin, delicate crux calling at once birdsong and the melodious stirring of worms, ecstatic axis whose dragonfly-like skinning of this New Jersey asphalt parking lot sucks gasps and moans from all of Trinidad's tarpits. Ankle, ankle, for which I would give my good hand to listen to its trillion vascular secrets, which include heartbreak's 4268 glistening names. Silk, stamen, inseam, moonlight, diamond, father, smoke, mirage, ankle. Don't ask, just close your eyes, get on your knees and pray. Hum. ^M00:47:08 [ Applause ] ^M00:47:13 >> Ron Charles: It's an erotic version of Mary Tyler Moore at the, at the clown's funeral, remember that? [laughter] >> Ross Gay: No. No, what was that? >> Ron Charles: You know, Chuckles the Clown, when she goes to the funeral? >> Ross Gay: No. [laughter] >> [Inaudible] put that on YouTube later. >> Ross Gay: Okay, Okay. Will do. >> Ron Charles: You know, she's supposed to be very reverent, but she can't stop laughing during a funeral. You're obviously supposed to be grieving, and you can't stop observing this presumed young woman's ankle. Yeah. The persistence of life amidst grief, lust amidst sorrow. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Lovely and funny. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, totally, totally, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like the, you know, it's a body. That's like sort of admiring like being alive or like sort of being alive, which includes, you know, the dead, the dead in the other room. >> Ron Charles: The arrival of your father's voice-- >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Is sad and funny. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, I know. >> Charlotte Harper: It's like, no, no, go on, go on. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Now you say something. [laughter] >> Ross Gay: It is funny. No, yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean it's like I can remember the experience from the poem, that the poem sort of came out of it. It was around the time of, it was, you know, all these, so many of these poems are poems of mourning for my father. It's just like these different ways of sort trying to sort of contend with this absence and this sorry and this, you know, illness that had led up to it and all this. And that's one of them. I mean one of the thing that I sort of was getting a kick out of reading the poem is how much it's in the mouth. It's so like chewy, you know. Like all those words, and it kind of makes me glad to remember, again Tom Lux and other people, how much a kind of like leaning on language is going on. And it's just like the erotic, it's the erotics of the music in the mouth, you know, is sort of happening. So that even saying it, it's like your mouth has to do all these sorts of, you know, things. >> Ron Charles: Right. It pushes back against death even in memorializing it. >> Ross Gay: Totally, yeah. It's like music. You know, you dance. That's it. You know. >> Ron Charles: In one poem you say dance is one of the things you happen to do pretty well. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. [laughter] >> Ron Charles: Yeah. ^M00:49:53 ^M00:50:06 >> Ross Gay: I love that, even though I don't know it, I love that Mary Tyler Moore reference. [laughter] That was totally curveball. That's great. ^M00:50:15 ^M00:50:21 >> Ron Charles: The poem called Overheard. >> Ross Gay: Um, yeah. Overheard. It's a beautiful day the small man said from behind me, and I could tell he had a slight limp from the rasp of his boot against the sidewalk, and I was slow to look at him, because I've learned to close my ears against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing them to my own mind. And although he said it, I did not hear it until he said it a second or third time, but he did. He said, it's a beautiful day. And something in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding between two oaks overhanging a basketball court on Tenth Street made me too catch hold of that light, opening my hands to the dream of the soon blooming, and never did he say forget the crick in your neck nor your bloody dreams. He did not say forget the multiple shades of your mother's heartbreak nor the father in your city, kneeling over his bloody child. Nor the five species of bird this second become memory. No, he said only it's a beautiful day, this tiny man, limping past me with upturned palms, shaking his head in disbelief. ^M00:51:35 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:51:38 [ Applause ] ^M00:51:41 >> Ron Charles: That old man-- >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: In that one phrase, in that act of recognizing the beauty of the day does everything your palms do. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, that's it, that's it. I was just thinking like, oh, that's an ethics. And I think probably, you know, like that's one of the, one of the teachers of, for me, of an ethics that I aspire to, I think, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Not Pollyannaish, not ignoring anything, not denying anything bad, recognizes all the bad things. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: It can also still be a beautiful day. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. Totally. >> Ron Charles: You're totally into gardening. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, big time. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: And it's an adult passion. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, I learned, I started gardening, I mean like really gardening in a garden where I live in the last 11 years, yeah. >> Ron Charles: It is or you have made it into a perfect metaphor for your work. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Everything dies. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: And new life springs up from those things. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: And pushed dead-looking things into the ground, and life comes out of it. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: It's a miracle that your poems again and again reenact. >> Ross Gay: Right, right, yeah. ^M00:53:00 ^M00:53:04 And the garden is like this bounty, like this bounty, like this bounty of sort of, you know, like it's so full of wonder and incomprehensible like happenings, you know. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Ross Gay: Like there's so much going on in a garden, which is part of why I remain fascinated, and I think I'll probably never not be fascinated by the garden because I will come upon something, and I'll be like, what are you doing? You know, what is happening? Like how is it that this many pollinators are swirling around? Like I can't get my head around it, you know. And that feels, that feels wonderful. Like there is this cycle, this utterly necessary cycle going on that I can witness and be like that's fucking beautiful and-- >> Ron Charles: Miraculous. >> Ross Gay: Yes, yes, yes. >> Ron Charles: You have so many great references in your poems to bees. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Bumblebees. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Bees coming out of flowers covered in pollen. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Confused and drunk. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: You have a gorgeous poem called burial about using your own father's, using your own father's ashes as fertilizer for your plums. Could you read that for us? >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. Of course. >> Ron Charles: Mark 14. >> Ross Gay: Yep. So when I read this, I need to ask if anyone has done anything with placenta? ^M00:54:47 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:54:49 What have you done with a placenta, if I may? >> I buried it under a tree in our back garden, a cherry tree that I love very much. >> Ross Gay: Okay, great. Yeah, yeah. So that's a thing. A beautiful thing. Burial. You're right, you're right. The fertilizer is good. It wasn't a gang of dullard came up with chucking a fish in the planting hole or some midwife got lucky with the placenta. Oh, I'll plant a tree here. And a sudden flush of quince and jam enough for months. Yes, the magic dust our bodies become cast spells on the roots about which someone else could tell you the chemical processes, but it's just magic to me, which is why a couple springs ago when first put it in my two bare root plum trees out back I took the jar which has become my father's house and lonely for him and hoping to coax him back for my mother as much as me, poured some of him in the planting holes. And he dove in, glad for the robust air, saddling a slight gust into my nose and mouth, chuckling as I coughed. But mostly he disappeared into the minor yawns in the earth, into which I placed the trees, splaying wide their roots and casting the gray dust of my old man evenly throughout the hole, replacing then the clods of dense Indiana soil until the roots and my father were buried, watering it all in with one hand while holding the tree with the other straight as the flag to the nation of simple joy, of which my father is now a naturalized citizen. Waving the flag from his subterranean lair. The roots curled around him like shawls or jungle gyms, like hookahs or the arms of ancestors before breast stroking into the xylem, riding the elevator up through the cambium and into the leaves where when you put you ear close enough you can hear him whisper. Good morning. Where if you close your eyes and push your face you can feel his stubbly jowls, and good Lord, this year he was giddy at the first real fruit set and nestled into the 30 or 40 plums in the two trees, peering out from the sweet meat with his hands pressed against the purple skin, like cathedral glass. And imagine his joy as the sun wizarded forth those abundant sugars, and I plodded barefoot and prayerful at the first ripe plum swell and blush, almost weepy, conjuring some surely ponderous verse to convey this bottomless grace. You know, oh father, oh father kind of stuff. Hundreds of hot air balloons filling the sky in my chest. We're placing his intubated body, listing like a boat keel side up. Replacing the steady stream of water from the one eye, which his brother wiped before removing the tube. Keeping his hand on the forehead until the last wind, and his body wandered off, while my brother wailed like an animal. And my mother said, weeping, it's okay. It's okay. You can go honey. At all of which my father guffawed, by kicking from the first buckets of juice down my chin, staining one of my two button-down shirts, the salmon-colored silk one, hollering, there's more of that. Almost dancing now, the plum in the tree. The way he did as a person, bent over and biting his lip and chucking the one hip out and then the other with his elbows cocked and fists loosely made and eyes closed and mouth made trumpet when he knew he could make you happy, just by being a little silly and sweet. ^M00:58:39 [ Applause ] ^M00:58:46 >> Ron Charles: That's just perfect. That's not a poem you can write in the grips of fresh grief. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right, that's right. >> Ron Charles: That's grief resolved. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Transformed. >> Ross Gay: Transformed, yeah. Yeah, and the garden sort of modeled how we might do that, for me. >> Ron Charles: It's very lovely. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, thank you. >> Ron Charles: Very lovely. ^M00:59:06 ^M00:59:13 In the title poem of your latest collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, you write, I can't stop my gratitude, which includes dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last thing. Why is gratitude so important to you, or why has it become so important to you? >> Ross Gay: You know, I've been trying to think about that, like, I mean obviously it's sort of this, as I'm reading all of these poems, it's this think I'm sort of like arriving at over years of sort of thinking and study. But I think, like thinking about that heaven poem, it's like what am I working out there, like working out like how do you sort of deal with all of it, like sort of just sort of be with all of it. And but then there's this, this thing in that Catalog poem where I, I sort of, you know, I want to practice this thing of acknowledgement, that one, that we are not here long if we're, you know, we're not here long. And so there is this kind of preciousness that no matter what it's fleeting, you know, and it's passing, and you are passing, and I am passing, and that, I think we're more likely, if we're sort of with that, we're more likely to love each other actually, you know. And then I think of this, I've been thinking about like what, I had this card, I mean I do letter press printing, and I made these cards with the word interdepend on them. And I gave, I gave one to a friend, and she was like, yeah, that's, that can be hard work, hard to do, you know. And I was like, right, and sort of thinking about it, and I was thinking, like among the sorrows or mistakes or failures of the imagination again is to, is to not understand or not believe that we are fundamentally interdependent, you know. And when I say we, I mean the grand we, meaning the water, you know, meaning the air, meaning the trees, you know. Everything is interdependent, and that is like, and I feel like, you know, when you celebrate, and it just occurred to me like, you know, maybe I'm slow coming to this, but when you celebrate the winter equinox say, you're saying to the earth, etc., if you're so gracious as to come back, Summer, that would be awesome, you know. [laughter] Which is like a real thing to say. Like if you are so gracious to rain again or to stop raining or however it is, if you're so gracious as to grow things. And it strikes me that the more, the more I think about gratitude, the more I'm thinking that like, you know, because there's like gratitude about like, yeah, I got a nice pair of shoes, I'm grateful, like that's, who cares, you know. When I'm talking about gratitude, I think, the more I sort of try to put it together in my head, I'm talking about the understanding of this like undeniable interconnectedness and interdependence actually, and I think that's thing that we are utterly necessary to one another. And again, like the one another is the big one another, and I feel like if you, if you think of it like that, it is like, it conjures and it requires gratitude. It requires gratitude, you know. But if you think, I'm in charge of the water because I turn it on and I pay the bill, it's like that's a fucking joke. That's a joke. See. [laughter] >> Ron Charles: From the mouth of babes. [laughter] You knew I was going to have you read this. >> Ross Gay: Great. It's called Thank You. If you find yourself half naked and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing again the earth's great sonorous moan that says, you are the air of the now and gone, that says all you love will turn to dust and will meet you there. Do not raise your fist. Do not raise your small voice against it. And do not take cover. Instead, curl your goes into the grass, watch the cloud ascending from your lips. Walk through the garden's dormant splendor. Say only thank you. Thank you. >> Oh, yeah. >> Ross Gay: That's interesting, huh. ^M01:04:34 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:40 >> Ron Charles: It's an early poem. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, it's an early poem, yeah. It's the last poem of the book. >> Ron Charles: That spiritual wisdom has been generating your poems for years. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. >> Ron Charles: Huh. We sing a hymn in my church, a grateful heart a garden is. There is a kind of wisdom and gratitude in being able to see what you've been given. >> Ross Gay: Oh my God, totally. >> Rob Casper: The graciousness of your life. >> Ross Gay: Totally, totally, yeah. Absolutely. Like it's a kind of, it requires maybe many things, but tenderness among them, you know. Like, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Humility. >> Ross Gay: Humility. >> Ron Charles: Love. >> Ross Gay: Yeah, love. God. How lucky. ^M01:05:30 ^M01:05:36 >> Ron Charles: The last poem I'll ask you to read tonight, Wedding. >> Ross Gay: Oh. Cool. >> Ron Charles: I suppose this was written for friends, but-- >> Ross Gay: It was, it totally was. >> Ron Charles: It works for anybody. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. It's called Wedding Poem, yeah for my friends Keith and Jen. Friends, I am here to modestly report seeing in an orchard in my town a gold finch kissing a sun flower again and again, dangling upside down by its tiny claws, steadying itself by snapping open like an old tiny fan, its wings, again, and again. Until swooning it tumbled off and swooped back to the very same perch, where the sunflower curled its giant swirling of seeds around the bird and leaned back to admire the soft wind nudging the bird's plumage. And friends, I could see the points on the flower's stately crown soften and curl inward as it almost indiscernibly lifted the food of its body to the bird's nuzzling mouth, whose fervor I could hear from oh 20 or so feet away and see from the tiny hulls that sailed form their good racket, which good racket, I have to say, was making me blush and rock up on my tippy toes and just barely purse my lips with what I realize now was being simply glad, which such love, if we let it, makes us feel. ^M01:07:09 [ Applause ] ^M01:07:18 >> Ron Charles: So, grateful you came tonight. >> Ross Gay: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: It's been a delight to talk to you. >> Ross Gay: It's fun to talk to you. Yeah, it's great. >> Ron Charles: There's books for sale and people can come talk to you and get their books signed. >> Ross Gay: Great, yeah. >> Ron Charles: Really nice >> Ross Gay: Thank you so much. It was really nice to talk. Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Thank you ^M01:07:33 [ Applause ]