Reading Ross Gay
30/09/24 01:57
I’ve been reading essays by Ross Gay recently. I started by reading his New York Times bestselling, “The Book of Delights.” I wasn’t overly impressed. He is a good writer, and I’m not sure what about the book disappointed me. Perhaps it is that I expected the book to have an essay for each day of a year. After all, it is introduced as his assuming the discipline of writing a brief essay about a delight each day for a year. Perhaps he maintained that discipline and wrote 365 essays but not all of them were deemed worthy of publication. That is the way it is for me. Were I to make a book of my journal entries, not every entry would be worthy of a book. However, it ends up appearing that he just didn’t really keep the discipline of writing one essay a day. I was a bit disappointed by the shortness of his essays. There are a lot of good ideas in the book that could be more fully developed. Very few, if any, of his essays are as long as my journal entries and many of them are significantly shorter - just a few paragraphs that seem to me to be barely an essay. Had they been responses to an assignment I gave to students, I would have requested that he go back, write more, and more fully develop his ideas.
However, I continued to read his work, skipping for now over “The Book of More Delights,” and reading instead “Inciting Joy.” I continue to read for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that colleagues who are decades younger than I highly recommended him to me. Part of the joy of my life is having friends and colleagues of many different ages, and I have derived a lot of inspiration from the suggestions of people decades younger than I. I am also enticed because he has some really strong endorsements in the liner notes. Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, gave a one word review of “Inciting Joy.” She wrote, “Brilliant.” I have been so inspired by Limón’s poetry and if she finds a book to be brilliant, I think it is worthy of my attention. Both Gay and Limón are a generation younger than I. She is 48 and he is 50. They aren’t exactly young, but they are enough younger than I to bring an important perspective to my reading.
So I’ll continue to read more. Perhaps I’ll check out Gay’s “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. I suspect I will appreciate Gay’s poetry more than his essays.
Gay is a gardener and he wrote a fun essay about going through seed catalogues, both online and in print. I share his enthusiasm for those catalogues, which among other things feature some really good photographs of flowers, fruit, and vegetables. I can identify with his tendency to over order seeds and young plants. The essay goes on to describe the plants in his garden and I am impressed with is knowledge of a widely diverse collection. He writes about his sunflowers and that got my attention because I try to grow sunflowers every year. The tall plants with dramatic flowers are such fun. This year, for whatever reason, I had a very low germination rate for my sunflowers seeds. I have a few shorter plants and one lone super tall sunflower with giant blossoms. The single big plant is worth all of the effort. It is gorgeous, and I can identify with his joy in the sunflowers.
In the essay he reports finding “teeny bumble-looking-bees” nestled in the sunflowers. He describes them as “sacked out” and tired. Gay may know a lot about seeds and plants, but he isn’t an authority on bees. He speculates that the bees have homes elsewhere and are nestled in the sunflowers because they are exhausted from the process of pollination. He doesn’t have the story of the bees quite right.
The bees probably are bumble bees and not honey bees. Honey bees that overnight away from the hive are usually female workers who are nearing the end of their lives. By exposing themselves to overnight cold away from the hive they decrease the possibility of them dying in the hive, which makes more work for the other bees. The bumble bees he finds in the sunflowers are probably males, which are smaller than females. The organization of a bumble bee nest is quite different from honey bees, but in both colonies, the main function of males is to mate with a queen. Bumble bee queens mate with males from other colonies to insure genetic diversity. The number of males produced by a colony is based on the amount of resources available. The first batches of bees that pupate in the spring are female and spend their lives foraging and returning to the nest. Males are produced only after the nest is established and has sufficient resources. Some nests never get to the stage of producing males. Others produce small numbers. The males leave the nest to mate with members of a different colony and never return. They expire within a few weeks, and can be found sleeping on vegetation in late summer.
Gay describes petting the bees he finds on the sunflowers. It is good that he is doing so with males rather than female ones. Only queens and female worker bumble bees have stingers. The males won’t sting. if they feel threatened their defensive behavior is lying on their backs.
The encounter with the bees is incidental to the essay and perhaps does not deserve more attention or expertise. It left me wishing that Gay would write an essay on the bees. Doing so, however, would require him to do a bit of simple research. Information about bees is readily available on the Internet. The Xerces Society in the United States has all of the information he would need on their website.
So I’ll read a bit more by Gay and I’ll definitely explore some of his poetry. And, in the meantime, unlike him, I will continue to write a lengthy essay every day. After all he is a published author and I’m only an aspiring writer. There must be much worth reading in his books.
However, I continued to read his work, skipping for now over “The Book of More Delights,” and reading instead “Inciting Joy.” I continue to read for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that colleagues who are decades younger than I highly recommended him to me. Part of the joy of my life is having friends and colleagues of many different ages, and I have derived a lot of inspiration from the suggestions of people decades younger than I. I am also enticed because he has some really strong endorsements in the liner notes. Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, gave a one word review of “Inciting Joy.” She wrote, “Brilliant.” I have been so inspired by Limón’s poetry and if she finds a book to be brilliant, I think it is worthy of my attention. Both Gay and Limón are a generation younger than I. She is 48 and he is 50. They aren’t exactly young, but they are enough younger than I to bring an important perspective to my reading.
So I’ll continue to read more. Perhaps I’ll check out Gay’s “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. I suspect I will appreciate Gay’s poetry more than his essays.
Gay is a gardener and he wrote a fun essay about going through seed catalogues, both online and in print. I share his enthusiasm for those catalogues, which among other things feature some really good photographs of flowers, fruit, and vegetables. I can identify with his tendency to over order seeds and young plants. The essay goes on to describe the plants in his garden and I am impressed with is knowledge of a widely diverse collection. He writes about his sunflowers and that got my attention because I try to grow sunflowers every year. The tall plants with dramatic flowers are such fun. This year, for whatever reason, I had a very low germination rate for my sunflowers seeds. I have a few shorter plants and one lone super tall sunflower with giant blossoms. The single big plant is worth all of the effort. It is gorgeous, and I can identify with his joy in the sunflowers.
In the essay he reports finding “teeny bumble-looking-bees” nestled in the sunflowers. He describes them as “sacked out” and tired. Gay may know a lot about seeds and plants, but he isn’t an authority on bees. He speculates that the bees have homes elsewhere and are nestled in the sunflowers because they are exhausted from the process of pollination. He doesn’t have the story of the bees quite right.
The bees probably are bumble bees and not honey bees. Honey bees that overnight away from the hive are usually female workers who are nearing the end of their lives. By exposing themselves to overnight cold away from the hive they decrease the possibility of them dying in the hive, which makes more work for the other bees. The bumble bees he finds in the sunflowers are probably males, which are smaller than females. The organization of a bumble bee nest is quite different from honey bees, but in both colonies, the main function of males is to mate with a queen. Bumble bee queens mate with males from other colonies to insure genetic diversity. The number of males produced by a colony is based on the amount of resources available. The first batches of bees that pupate in the spring are female and spend their lives foraging and returning to the nest. Males are produced only after the nest is established and has sufficient resources. Some nests never get to the stage of producing males. Others produce small numbers. The males leave the nest to mate with members of a different colony and never return. They expire within a few weeks, and can be found sleeping on vegetation in late summer.
Gay describes petting the bees he finds on the sunflowers. It is good that he is doing so with males rather than female ones. Only queens and female worker bumble bees have stingers. The males won’t sting. if they feel threatened their defensive behavior is lying on their backs.
The encounter with the bees is incidental to the essay and perhaps does not deserve more attention or expertise. It left me wishing that Gay would write an essay on the bees. Doing so, however, would require him to do a bit of simple research. Information about bees is readily available on the Internet. The Xerces Society in the United States has all of the information he would need on their website.
So I’ll read a bit more by Gay and I’ll definitely explore some of his poetry. And, in the meantime, unlike him, I will continue to write a lengthy essay every day. After all he is a published author and I’m only an aspiring writer. There must be much worth reading in his books.