Ross Gay - Book of Flowers - Harvard talk

 

March 9, 2016

(12:37)

"I want to say and re-say to anyone who ask me, I do believe in gratitude ("flowers") as  a kind of discipline, an energizing and catalyzing, and potential collectivizing discipline. What I mean is that, when I'm thinking of gratitude, or the gratitude I'm thinking of, is the ways we make each other possible. And that gratitude makes me more interested in making people possible, myself included.

...

(14:28)

If there's anything that's interesting to me about the poems, it's that they are motivated by precisely the desire to reach across, which is exactly what metaphor means, after all. Have you seen the moving trucks in Greece emblazoned with the word metaphores? My poems would be stupid little things to me, if they didn't reach your way. Who has the time?

...

(24:39)

I'm resisting your question about resistance, looks like. But I'm not really resisting; truth is, I'm making an argument. I'm making my argument with my body and the ground, about our bodies and the ground. 

...

(28:30)

How you see or what you see depends on the ground. You cannot engrave, in other words, you cannot cannot dig, in other words, you cannot prepare the earth for your body, without a proper and true ground. Maybe this book of flowers is a preparation for the ground I wish to enter.

...

(28:55)

... I'm talking about the ground, what holds us, what we walk on, what we fall onto, what we leap from, what holds us, the ground.

Or in a painting that against which the marks are made in a Franz Kline painting, the big industrial swipes of black arguing with or emerging from or even resisting the creamy surfaces, gestures legible because of the ground, dependent upon the ground, or better yet a Glen Ligon painting, the Zora Neale Hurston quote ad black text on a white surface: "I feel most colored when I'm thrown against a sharp white background."

...

(28:34)

I'm really curious about the ground of our imaginations and the ground that it is implied or assumed by the word resistance in the context of your question... about this book. "What are you resisting in your book about flowers, black man?"

...

(30:00)

What I hope I'm doing actually is imagining a ground different than the one the question presumes. Because the ground that question presumes is something I refuse to abide. On that ground, which is simply descriptive of an America, which is for the record, like everything fleeting. Let's call it an American ground, in which, for which, upon which black people are not actually people.  And sometimes it feels that if an America grants that if we are people, that it also imagines that our natural condition is pain, is suffering, is turmoil, is indignity, is death. It's big business, our suffering, our death. 

... 

(30:55)

Sometimes it seems to me that a black person becomes more legible in this particular American ground the closer they are to being dead. ... 

(31:09)

That is the ground. I hear myself say it among friends, so I'll say it to you right now, that they would like us to believe it. They would like us to believe, I sometimes believe, watching Walter Scott being shot again and again on the news, when any child can see... watching Tamir Rice be murdered again and again that our natural state, our natural condition, our ground is pain, if not death. ... 

(31:54)

Let's call that an American imaginative ground. ... A foundational American imaginative ground. ... I don't believe in it as a ground. And consequently I don't believe in it as something to be resisted. I just believe it's a persistent and abhorrent disruption to the actual ground, the actual ground being what I hope my book, a black man's book of flowers might look at. ... 

(32:36)

I'm a flower in your garden being planted around your garden, a fervent and raucous mint. 

So what's the ground? Our necessary lives or our lives necessary. And in our lives are so many things -- loss, sorrow, violence, pain, yes, but also delight, silliness, raucous laughter, care, care, as I see it, above all. Love, as I see it, above all. A thousand, thousand undocumented instances in my life alone of how I've been loved and cared for, lives that have seen my life and thereby made it possible. Lives, life, which has made our lives possible. 

(33:18)

[Reads "A Small Needful Fact"]

(34:00)

Celebration, exultation, praise, gratitude, and the rigorous practice, the rigorous public practice of those things is one of the ways we remind ourselves that our lives are the ground, that living is the ground. Those things remind us that being murdered and fucked over and terrorized is an aberration and to announce to the state or our shared consciousness or a broken American imagination by hollering with the light at our utterly necessary lives, our beautiful, beautiful necessary lives, that we are in fact meant to live. 

So ... this book about flowers by a black man ... was both utterly conscious -- I knew what I was and wasn't saying -- and what, perhaps, I'm expected to be saying -- and it was just me minding my business, talking about my life, my life."

(35:32)

[Reads "A Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude"]

Which ends..

I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude

over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,

the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems

slipping into your eye. Soon it will be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,

holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky

hurtling our way like so many buffalo,

who said it’s much worse than we think,

and sooner; to whom I said

no duh child in my dreams, what do you think

this singing and shuddering is,

what this screaming and reaching and dancing

and crying is, other than loving

what every second goes away?

Goodbye, I mean to say.

And thank you. Every day.