I DON’T know too many people who consider eating watermelon during a summer thunderstorm in the middle of the Ozarks as good a time as I do—with the notable exception of Ross Gay. We met years ago through one of our dear mutual friends, Patrick Rosal, who, along with Ross, shaped the most exhilarating reading I’d ever been a part of: the 2008 Funk Reading, held at Indiana University, where Ross teaches—featuring Aracelis Girmay, Tyehimba Jess, Pat, and yours truly. And I can clearly remember the bang-smash feeling going on in my brain as I first read Ross’s debut collection, Against Which (CavanKerry, 2006), a couple of years earlier.
Just who was this person who wrote of the corporeal electric, loss, and “The Truth,” as one of the poems in that first book was titled, in ways I had never seen before, seemingly unafraid and unabashed, with a table of contents that featured bodily drips, sighs, worms, birdsong, and armpits? And that he was my peer, that we had similar pop culture reference points? I don’t know how common this is—it certainly wasn’t for me—but here, finally, was a poet my age who paid close, I mean close, attention to the air, the soil, and the heartbeats of people around him, who didn’t flinch when staring down questions of our loved ones’ mortality and even our own. When I closed that book I had a vague, not-too-fleeting hope to one day meet this beautiful mind. Someday. When I finally did, at the Funk Reading, our friendship was instant and enduring—lit up with laughter, tears, gardening questions and observations, and a growing stack of envelopes, as we’ve been writing to each other (actual letters) for close to fourteen years now.
“Literary friendships,” writes poet A. E. Stallings, “real, live, in-person friendship (as opposed to Facebook “friend”-ship), where you store up the laughter and silence of real meetings, in sound-of-voice conversations—are nourishing and replenishing.” This rang especially true during the last two years of the pandemic when the letters Ross and I exchanged could only be bolstered not through shared teaching gigs or conference appearances, as is otherwise often the case, but through the glowing boxes on our computers, in windows known as Zoom.
Ross Gay was born in 1974 in Youngstown, Ohio, which, I like to joke with him, means he’s a Buckeye too, but he grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania. In that state, he played football as an undergrad and earned his doctorate from Temple University. Ross teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University and is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard. He is the author of four, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011);
