Originally published on Oct. 20.

Ross Gay is a poet from Youngstown, Ohio. Gay has three published books: Against Which, Bringing The Shovel Down, and Catalog Of Unabashed Gratitude. Catalog won the 2015 National Book Critics Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and the Ohioana Book Award. Catalog Of Unabashed Gratitude is nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Ross is also a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a nonprofit free fruit and community garden oriented project.

How did you first get into writing?  I think I wrote little poems and things before I started thinking of writing, but I became sort of serious about reading and writing after being introduced by a teacher in college to Amiri Baraka’s poems.

Was that teacher instrumental to your writing career?  He was. I was very close to failing out of college. I had a football scholarship, I was about to lose my funding, and I think that and some other things, people I met, got me to a place where I could start to think about the pleasure of making things. I got around people who were making things. I got exposed to beautifully made things in a way that I appreciate now.

I can tell an artistic community is important to you. How would you create or find one? It’s interesting, you know, from where I went to college I have two or three people who are still making art, and there’s no real calculus for how that happens. Except, maybe the fact that we were dissatisfied with what was available to us. And then in graduate school I became close with some other people, not around what we were dissatisfied with, but around what we fundamentally loved which were poems. But that’s not entirely true. One of my best friends, and part of my poetic community, Patrick Rosal, we didn’t even talk about poetry at first when we became friends. We just played basketball. It was years later that we started talking about each other’s poems. So that’s a long way of saying that I don’t know. But it’s utterly true that it’s crucial to have a kind of community that sees you and values you.

You went to college for football, and play basketball today. What effect do sports have on your life?  You know it’s hard exactly to say, but I can sort of talk about what other people have said. Speculate a little bit. One of my friends Simone White, beautiful poet, writer, has talked to me about training, and sport as a kind of training. It’s a kind of discipline and, you know, one of the things about making art is that it is a discipline. Partly, it just requires you to sit down and do it. She brought to my attention that if you can run a lot of miles, it’s kind of like sitting or a long time with a poem, with language or a line. It’s the same thing, because we want to do something else. It can be uncomfortable.

What kind of poems are easier for you to write?  Bad poems. Really good poems are hard to write, and they’re hard for me to write right now. That’s what I’m trying to write. Poems that I don’t know how to write. Yea, I’m really interested in poems I don’t know how to write.

Is there a way for you to get into that “hard poetry” mindset?  Good question! I don’t know. I’m always trying to write poems I don’t know how to write. I’m always trying to write poems that will teach me something fundamental about my life, or about life. So mostly when I get into my writing, it’s always about that. If I’m going to write a poem I’m in that space.

Gardening is a huge part of your life. What’s your favorite flower? I love sunflowers. But I also love zinnias. I mainly grow food, but okra, which is related to hibiscus, has a beautiful flower. I also love peach tree flowers, peach blossoms. They’re so delicate and beautiful. I love apple blossoms. They’re unbelievable. I’ve been growing for a long time. I love a lot of flowers.

Do you like traveling all the time? I enjoy it. I really like it. Being away from my garden, that’s the one thing I struggle with. Because when you’re gone for a long time it gets out of control.

Your first two books seem to be in a dark area, and your third one is all about gratitude. What was the process, the shift that happened? It’s interesting. The first book is had the first poems I wrote that I felt were good enough to be in a book. There’s a couple of celebratory poems, that are more, I don’t even know how to say it. The second book is a really interesting book to me, and I feel like in that book you can see a kind of transformation where in the beginning of that book it’s just in a state of critique, and it’s really trying to engage in what it means to live in the culture that we live in. The country that we live in. It’s also trying to imagine a way out of that. By the end of that book I feel like there’s a kind of ethical transformation of the speaker or the imagination, or the imaginative horizons that are available to me as a writer, ideally to a reader. What arrives at the end of that book makes it possible for the third book to happen. The first two books were necessary for me to get to that third, and I’m glad that I was able to arrive at that third book. I always say it’s about that kind of adult joy, and when I say adult joy I mean how you manage to keep it above water, despite the fact of our lives, which is that it’s a struggle.

Do you have any specific practices that you use to take care of yourself? To keep it “above water”? I like tea. I like to sleep enough, and I exercise. And I have good friendships, good relationships. I take care of those.

What is something you want to remember about yourself right now, in twenty years? That I spent a lot of time adoring things.

What do you think poetry’s place in activism is right now?  I can’t speak to that in a big general way, but I feel like poems always seem to be part of political movements. Always. Like poetry, whatever the point of the poetry is, it seems like it’s always part of the movement, which is to say it’s a necessary part of activism. And I assume it’s a necessary part of activism now, just like it was thirty years ago, and a hundred years ago. People use poems! They use them for activism, they use them for weddings, they use them for funerals. I was just at a funeral last night and on the inside of the [pamphlet], there was a poem. That’s what we do. When people say shit like, oh no, poetry it’s… First of all, it’s fundamentally not true that there are any problems with poetry. But it’s like, anytime you go to a wedding, anytime you go somewhere life happens, you go to a march, you go to a rally, poems are part of it.

What did you read as a young poet?  So, I didn’t start reading until I was in college. I read comic books as a kid. You know like Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, and then Sylvia Plath, you know? I remember reading this Mark Strand book, like his selected poems. I read everything! When I started writing more seriously, my sophomore, junior year in college, I was just constantly reading… I didn’t read everything! That’s bullshit. That’s completely bullshit! I read very contemporary poetry. That’s what I was interested in. And I wanted to read poems by people of color.

What was your favorite comic?  Iron Man and Iron Fist. You know Luke Cage? Yea. So if there was like a black superhero, I was like “I need that”. I had everyone except three. They had a 100 or 120 comic run. But you know, my parents threw them away. They threw them away at college! My brother had a bunch of comics too. It hurts! God, I’d love to have those around.

What were your favorite parts about those heroes?  Power Man, I loved how he was a Black guy. I also loved that he was like a badass but he wasn’t. He had skin that was like steel. So it was like, that’s tough, but I’m not into those DC Comics with people who are almost entirely invincible. Luke Cage, he was tough but he wasn’t invincible by any stretch of the imagination. You know, I used to read this thing called Marvel Universe, and it had stats of all the comic book characters, of all the heroes. So you could find out what Luke Cage bench pressed, you could find out how fast he ran a hundred yard dash. He had a good bench, but it wasn’t crazy. He was superhuman but he wasn’t like, super super human. He was just very tough and he had a good outfit. He had a headband a butterfly collar, the tights. He looked good! He looked really good. He was fly as hell.

What kind of music do you listen to?  All kinds! I was just talking about Kamasi Washington. I just downloaded a Thundercat record. I just got the new De La Soul record which I pitched in on the Kickstarter for. I like all different kinds of music.

Is there something you’re more drawn to by an artist? Its lyricism, versus the beat or the instrumental?  I feel like there’s such a wide variety. It’d be interesting if I could parse out what I’m drawn to. There is a thing that I believe in called soul, but I don’t know how to commodify it or even articulate it. I’ve been listening to a lot of Sam Cooke lately, and it’s so beautiful to me.

Do you think soul is something you can teach, or is always there?  I don’t know. You know there’s all of these analogies and crazy terms. Duwende is a piece of art or music or performance or literature and there’s this thing that sort of came out of the ground and there’s a sort of spirit that Duwende has, and soul feels to me kind of like that. I don’t know where it resides. I don’t know if it’s a teachable thing. I don’t know if it shows up and goes away and shows up again, but I can definitely identify when I’m witnessing something with soul, and often that something is imperfect. Quote unquote.

What has been your favorite imperfect, perfect moment? Something you’ve done or seen?  There’s this marching band that I saw years ago, but they were pretty new the first time I saw them. I don’t know how long they’d been together but they were pretty new and they had like, acrobats and stilts and all this fire. I saw them two years in a row. The first year it looked like, “Oh, someone might get hurt.” Like, “someone might get their face burned off.” It was intense! And they were great. The second time they seemed perfect. So much less interesting. I’m actually way less interested in things that are represented as masterism. I’m not very interested in mastery. I’m really interested in things that strain at an individual or group’s capacity and ability, such that mastery itself is only the willingness to obliterate one’s own mastery. So if you see footage of John Coltrane, to watch him and Elvin Jones do their thing… Talk about a master, like, there’s no doubt about it. It’s plain and simple. He could play a beautiful song but that wasn’t what he was doing! He was far beyond that. That’s partly what’s really beautiful about Kamasi Washington. From the little bit that I’ve gotten to watch online and stuff, it’s not just being great that he’s trying to do. He’s trying to tear something new open. Erykah Badu, too. I love Erykah Badu. She’s so good, but there’s something to her. Her pursuit is not just beauty. It’s something bigger. We’re so lucky to have so many good artists around.

What do you think ties together musicians and poets and artists and photographers?  We’re all makers. We’re all sort of folks who are constructing a kind of vision and that’s significant. That’s a real thing.

What did your teammates say when you started writing poetry?  They were interested. I’m also a painter. I TA’d some classes that they were taking and they were interested. People often say “You’re a football player and a poet?” and like your first question, you were right to ask that question, there is quite a bit of overlap. The poem I’m working on right now is a long poem about Dr. J, the basketball player from the seventies and eighties. That’s just a poem about basketball. I’ve been watching this one clip. It’s just about one move that he made in the 1980 NBA Finals. Most of my research has largely been watching that one clip over and over.

Why Dr. J?  I grew outside Philadelphia. He was totally my basketball hero. I saw him play a couple times when I was a kid and he’s like so firmly in my conscious. That’s the only reason. I also think he was just the best.

What would you tell a youth poet right now?  Let what you love be your engine.