The Colby Echo

Issue date: 2/16/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Rob Kievit

Ross Gay entered the packed Robinson room of Miller library, squeezing between Colby students and faculty behind Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of English Literature Ira Sadoff, who introduced the poet. As he stepped up to the podium, clad in a green t-shirt with a hair pick that spelled "beautiful" in the teeth, the poet reminded the College community that "it's cold outside." He began his reading by saying, "most of my poems are based in a kind of truth, they stem from personal experiences, and often a concern for justice." He said that since it was black history month, he would also read a few poems on that topic. The poems' subject matter ranged from Gay's African American friend's white girlfriend, who insisted that her boyfriend just wasn't 'black' enough, to Gay being mistaken for other black poets, to a brutal drunken street fight which "is not a joke."

In "Broken Mania" the speaker encounters a girlfriend-abusing drunk, and begins to beat him while the drunken man's girlfriend "clutches my arm, wide-eyed and sad, not sure for whom she roots, but she knows her duty, where she sleeps."
In this poem, as in many others by Gay, the speaker finds himself conflicted between a call to violence and his passive morality, "wearing bear slippers, big, furry, with soft claws." The poet said that his "general thought about brutality and violence is that it's stupid," and rather than romanticizing it, he tries to show that it's wrong. His main objective, he says, is to make us not do that. This sentiment is represented in "Bringing the Shovel Down," which details a boy's experience of sneaking out of a sleeping house, bringing a dog treats, and then killing the dog with a shovel. Intermingled with the darker-toned poems of violence and truth, lighter poems with first lines like "I'd drive a thousand miles to suck the dick of the man who fucked her once," such as "Poem Beginning With a Line Overheard in the Gym," made the poet laugh, and he read this poem twice to emphasize the iambic ridiculousness of overhearing such a thing while doing "dumb work on the bench press."

For the most part, Gay's poems are definitely not lighthearted, in spite of the poet's charismatic presentation. A self-described "windbag," who writes for content rather than sound or music, many of the poems deal with social wrongs and his personal longing to make them right despite not having any means of knowing how to do so. He does not give the reader answers, but rather illuminates their questions in long energetic sentences that wrap around the reader alluringly. For example, "Two Bikers Embrace on Broad Street" is about 33 lines, only one sentence, and as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Adrian Blevins pointed out, rings with music. As he writes a poem he says it out loud, and imagines a crowd hearing it. The last reading Gay gave, he said, was in a bar full of people who yelled out comments the whole time to the casual poet, which greatly contrasted with this Colby audience who has been trained to sit quietly in the library and politely hold their applause until the reader has completely finished. The poet called us "the quietest audience ever," but Sadoff said that we just had "good manners." If he was in a bar, the poet joked that the audience would probably say something stupid like "nice shirt." Though the audience was indeed reserved, it did not mean it was less enthusiastic. After his performance, only praise could be heard.

This was one of the best readings I've attended at Colby. The poems were intense, immensely compelling, and Gay was warmly charismatic. He was able to switch from suspense to cool conversation and back throughout the reading, which made for a thoroughly enjoyable experience which I am happy to say was well attended by the Colby community. Even though the time ran over, not one audience member left before the poet had finished his question and answer segment, which I've noticed at many of the other readings I've attended. Though the audience was silent during the reading the applause they held until the end showed they loved every word the poet spoke. To hear more of Gay go to www.fishhousepoems.org, and buy his recently released book "Against Which."

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