To spread the love ahead of Independent Bookstore Day this Saturday, booksellers at Seattle’s indies are reading selections from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, a collection of short essays cataloging a year of small, medium-sized, and large delights in the writer’s life. You can find these readings @SEABookstoreDay on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. On Saturday, April 25, at 4pm PDT, you can watch a livestream conversation between Gay himself and Robert Sindelar of Third Place Books, which I highly recommend.
As you can tell if you’ve already watched the vid I posted above, Gay is a magnetic reader who bursts with enthusiasm, which is somewhat surprising given his sustained study of poetry’s most difficult topic: joy. Gay often finds his in nature, but he finds it swirled with pain and systematic oppressions and all the rest. One of his most well-known poems, “A Small Needful Fact,” offers a great if more muted example of his style, and I think about it every time I hear his name. You can find it in his book, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, at your local bookstore, where you’ll also find The Book of Delights.
A few notes:
• Programming note: This is one of those poems where the title is the first line of the poem, so you’re just supposed to read it straight through.
• Officer Pantaleo killed Eric Garner on July 17, 2014, after putting him in what appeared to be a chokehold. Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. In this poem, Gay takes us off of the street and into the park, where Garner worked “for some time” in the horticultural department.
• All of the careful hedging and qualifying Gay does in the poem achieves a number of goals. First of all, it demonstrates a kind of carefulness in thinking that Officer Pantaleo did not demonstrate on that day. Pantaleo did not look at Garner as a father and gardener. He did not presume innocence. He looked at Garner as a threat who could push him through a storefront window. Flattening human beings into racist stereotypes is a failure of the imagination, evidence of a profound lack of perspective, and black and brown people die when cops fail to think in these terms. Even though it’s probably true that Garner planted plants that make it easier for us to breathe, Gay’s commitment to the truth is such that he won’t say it definitively. He wasn’t there. He didn’t watch Garner’s hands sink into the earth.
• As a technical matter, the hedging also creates anticipation in what would otherwise be, perhaps, too neat of a metaphor for the ways Garner is still with us literally, by way of his plants, and figuratively, by way of his influence on a movement that continues to fight for real police accountability measures.
