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.
Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.
“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” is not just the title of the poem from which this quote is derived but is also the title of the collection in which it is included. That collection earned the author the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2016 and placed him as a finalist for the National Book Award the previous year. The line quoted above is indicative of the conversational style and autobiographical content that is a hallmark of Gay’s poetry. He has asserted that he came up with the title for the collection before the poem and decided he had to write a poem with that title for inclusion. The direct address to his readers is also a recurring stylistic motif; oftentimes, the reader being addressed is a specific individual.
"What does your Hegel say about funk? Your Du Bois (pronounced Du BWAH)? See, I only date hood. My last man? He never even met his father. 4 women, 6 kids. 3 of whom are named after luxury cars. Child support? Do you know anything about your people?"
This quote—this entire poem—is problematic and not because it is a prose poem written in the form of an uninterrupted paragraph. Much of Gay’s verse is so conversational and autobiographical that a reader is almost compelled to imagine the narrative must be true. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t; a reader will never know unless research is done, but poetry should not depend upon research like that. As stated, the poem from which this quote is extricated is a monologue (hence the choice of prose poem makes perfect sense, stylistically speaking), but clearly situated as something not being said by the poet. The greater bulk of Gay’s best and most well-known poems are first-person riffs and this is no different, but the fact that it is a “character” speaking the lines should indicate a significant difference in tone, especially since that character is described right there in the title as a white woman. And yet, were it laid out more traditionally as a poem, would the voice really be notably different at all? (Not the words, but the tone.) And if the answer is no…why not? What might that be saying about Gay’s poetic perspective?
Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others
This is kind of a trick. The above quote is not really a quote from the poem, but the actual title of the poem. If the title did not supply the entire stimulus for the succeeding poem, the point of the verse would still be clear. But it would not be as powerful. Likewise, the power of this quote would not necessarily lose any of its force were it instead incorporated into the body of the poem, but existing as the title lends it a grab-you-by-the-throat quality that makes it virtually impossible not to want to read the story behind the title.
in the climactic pirouette, convulsive
shoulders rolling, the body’s final drift
smooth as a sun-baked bloodflake
flecked off a rhino’s horn, the gored
corpse sweet meat to a smoky gauze
of ravenous flies humming and blood-
sucking tiny gunpowder-singed hearts,
Just when Gay’s poetry seems easy to categorize or describe, he reveals that he is a typical poet, after all. Gone is the easy conversational tone and in its place is the fancy footwork of a poet working full-tilt within the artifice of poetry. “Marionette” is composed of 24 lines with only two periods to be found. And they’re both in the final line! The breathlessness of the lack of punctuation except for commas and you can’t really stop for a comma lest it become a period is intended to reflect the action of the poem which its dedication makes clear unless of course you are not familiar with the tragic story of Amadou Diallo. Shot 19 times out of 41 bullets fired by four NYPD officers who for some reason mistook the unarmed man for a rape suspect. That’s “suspect.” The frenzied craziness of an innocent man taking 19 bullets not because he was a convicted rapist, but merely a (wrongly) suspected rapist is an example not just of the versatility of Ross Gay, but is also a warning against dismissing the content of his poetry as merely autobiographical. “Marionette” succeeds in divulging the secret of understanding Gay’s poem: they must at all times be read on not just the personal, but a more expansively societal level.
