In my sleepy little town on the shores of Lake Erie, I teach creative writing workshops at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced level. In choosing texts for the semester, I try to select at least a few books that work for each tier of poetry class. But, really, I secretly believe you can find something to learn and borrow from any poetry collection, no matter your experience level in writing poetry. I’ve never much subscribed to the notion of, Oh that book will go right over undergrad writers’ heads!
I was never taught down to, and, given my background as a fledgling ex-chemistry major who came to poetry relatively late in my undergrad years, I’m glad my teachers presented me with books they found lasting and marvelous—their enthusiasm for those books was contagious, and even if I didn’t always share their exact levels of excitement, I saw it modeled before me that books of poetry are indeed a tangible thing to hold and read and re-read and—on any given day—a place to find a compressed and precise language of wisdom, heartbreak, and rapture—sometimes all at once.
I do believe there is a responsibility to assign and teach individual books (I usually teach from an anthology and two to three individual collections in an intro course, and about six to seven collections in an advanced course). I feel cheated that I never held a book of poetry in my hands by one person until I was a junior in college, and I think it’s a great way to support other poets: by giving them a gaggle of students hungry to dig into their books. In my beginning workshop classes, I often come across students who say they aren’t “into poetry” because they read a few poems in high school English and didn’t really like them. Confession: I love when they say this, because one of my favorite things to tell them (that is, gently shame them) is: “That’s like listening to a couple thrash metal songs and saying: Forget it! ALL MUSIC is not for me!” Or listening to Rob Base’s hip-hop classic “Joy and Pain” (from which I so gleefully cribbed the title of this very essay), not finding it danceable (unlikely, but I’ll allow it for this piece), and saying: Never again will I listen to a symphony, because I didn’t like one song on the dance floor.
I love watching the surprise and recognition on their faces when I point this out, and virtually all end up with a sheepish grin on their face. You can almost hear the clicks and whirrs as they try to retrofit their awareness of and openness to reading contemporary poems, not just because they are on the syllabus, but because they now realize how silly they were to ignore an entire genre of literature based on a few unsavory experiences. And once they get into this idea of being open to the world of our creative writing classroom, receptive to the idea that this will be a safe space in which to take risks and where their voices will be heard and have dignity afforded to them—that’s when the real magic and mining happens in the semester.
Often this risk and openness come together in two groups: poems of joy and poems of pain. Of course there are many crossovers and still many more poems that can’t easily be folded into one of these two envelopes. But those two subject categories seem to consistently comprise the largest groups of poems, no matter what level of workshop. One book that encompasses both of these swings of the pendulum is Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pitt Poetry Series, 2015). “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” is the first poem from Gay’s newest book and one I’ve assigned for students to use as a model for an original poem of their own that tells of finding joy in an unlikely spot. Gay’s poem runs six (six!) pages, without any punctuation, as one long sentence. We read these poems out loud, and even on the darkest of winter days, this poem ripples a smile on students’ faces when they can take a breath and laugh at the recognition of joy resulting from the speaker reaching up, high into a fig tree in the middle of an urban space, and, instead of quietly reveling in the bounty and sweetness of this singular tree, stops and shares figs with all he meets until a group of strangers mill about, literally eating out of each other’s hands: “...its eye / wept like hers / which she dabbed / with a kerchief as she / cleaved the fig with / what remained of her / teeth and soon there were / eight or nine/ people gathered beneath / the tree...” And when the outside world gives us more reports of hate crimes, terrorism, and children gunned down in playgrounds, I think the students find that reading poems of joy and gratitude for what we have is, in fact, a radical, a political act—that is, to stand up and take a moment to record goodness in people from all backgrounds. What a rare and necessary thing, a small but mighty way to say, in some small part of the word, Love wins. I play video of Ross Gay’s fantastic readings of this poem just so students can learn how he breaks his lines into columns, short but always moving forward down the page. Traditionally, a short line usually nudges the reader into a slower pace, but not so with Ross Gay’s more expansive, jubilant work.
Even when his poems take a darker turn, such as recalling the murder of a friend and colleague, or the bittersweet memory of a childhood crush who has since passed away—there are moments of true grace within these elegies—a slowing down, not in pacing but in memory’s leaps. I love using Ross’s darker poems as models for students seeking to write elegies for heartbreak and loss but who often still struggle with capturing the entirety of, say, their grandmother in a single poem. Don’t do it, I tell them. You’ll never be able to fit it on one page. Just focus on a single moment or two with her. And when they read poems such as “Feet” or “Spoon,” I see the lyric register deeper and more distinct in their poems, more authentic sounding in its specificity—and, as a result, these poems become more universal—which is what their goal was in the first place.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that Ross and I are, in fact, good friends. But long before our friendship started, we were mutual admirers of each other’s poems. I’ve already said in other venues (and I stand by it still!) that few contemporary poets risk singing such a singular compassion for the wounded world with Ross’s kind of musicality, intelligence, and intoxicating joy. And in writing workshops at all levels, I’ve found success in giving students the chance to unpack these tumbles of poems from the Catalog of Unabashed Joy to expand the moments of “sunshine…and rain” they draft in their early work in a semester.
In my most recent advanced poetry workshop, we held a gala class reading for the last week of classes, and I was delighted (but not surprised) to hear a good eighty percent of the class named this book as a major influence on their writing for that semester. And yet, if you were there in the audience as I was, proud as a peahen, you’d never be able to tell, just by hearing the poems, that there was a singular book uniting such an aesthetically different group. And yet, Catalog of Unabashed Joy’s musculature and skeleton, and, dare I say it—heart—was all there—the precision and rhapsody of this book sent my juniors and seniors into the first bee-dotted days of mortarboards and peonies, all of “our mouths sugared and shining.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes Bestselling book of nature essays, World of Wonders, and four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic. Awards for her writing include Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. She is the poetry editor of The Sierra Club’s SIERRA magazine and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.