Reading "Throwing Children" by Ross Gay in Allentown, PA
We're not really friends until I've read a poem aloud in your presence.
Once again: hello. It's been a few weeks, hasn't it? I actually didn't forget about this little writing space, nor did I lack ideas (or the willingness to dump a list of stuff I dig on everyone). I was actually on the move the last few weekends, which was a change of pace from my usual Friday routine of writing in bed. Which, obviously, I am currently doing.
Two Fridays ago I was visiting Purdue, which was a blast, and I'm tempted to write a whole post about my final Poetry and Comics class (hi, class! Wasn't that fun?). I traveled back to New York last Tuesday, woke up on Wednesday to this unforgettable Ross Gay poem in my inbox, and then decided on Thursday night to visit some friends in Philly and Allentown. So then last Friday, during the hours I would normally finish writing up a newsletter entry, I was on a bus to Philadelphia. What are you gonna do?
I lived in Allentown for six years, and I haven't been back to visit since 2019. Which is a very evasive way of saying that I still consider Allentown one of my homes and that being back was a great personal joy, especially spending time with people who mean an even greater deal to me. I read a great book, saw a great movie, ate great food. Great great great. Seriously, every moment was a delight.
And every moment that weekend, I couldn't stop thinking about the Ross Gay poem.
Instead of pasting a whole chunk of text, here's the link again: "Throwing Children" by Ross Gay, who's a poet and essayist I've loved and recommended to students and friends for years. Take a second to read the poem—maybe even listen to the recording—and come back to me.
I also took a break to listen. What a poem. What a poem! For more than a week I've been visiting and revisiting this poem—or even, as Gay himself says in the short comment, this "essayette." There's so much to admire about it, especially as someone inclined towards prose poems: the long, breathless, run-on sentence of it all. The specificity of the trees and the animals. The voice of the little girl cutting into the voice of the speaker. But, really, what I love about this poem is how it writes joy.
Anyone who knows Ross Gay's work wouldn't be surprised by the joyfulness of this poem, but it's just as moving as ever, most especially because there are so few poets who can write that particular emotion with such transcendence. I'm not saying it's easy to write poetry about the darker, more difficult emotions—poetry is the perfect vessel for ambiguity, but, by it's very nature, ambiguity is difficult to capture. So no, it's not easy to write poems about grief or aging or anger (political and otherwise) or even love. But, because poetry loves the ambiguous and the difficult, it is easy to go to poetry when trying to capture the depths and complexities of those big, big emotions, and I could name a trillion-zillion beautiful and accomplished poems that do, indeed, capture them.
If poetry is good at ambiguity by nature, by nature it's harder to write an unambiguous poem.
Forgive me the overstatement: there are certainly exceptions, probably many of them, to what I've just said. But what I really mean is that Gay has given us an unambiguously joyful poem: a poem about a laughing child that in another's hand would be flatly sentimental. Instead, "Throwing Children" takes a small moment and reveals what's necessary and beautiful about it: a "giddy little girl" can slow down time and force us to recognize the utter, almost painful loveliness of the world around us. The truth of this poem is beauty. Eat your heart out, Keats.
Anyway: I think it's a great poem. I cried when I read it, and then tweeted about crying when reading it. I also cried reading Green Arrow #1 two weeks ago, so take that with a grain of salt, but the point is: the poem moved me. And when a poem moves me, I want to share it with the people I love.
Which is what I did in Allentown. Share the poem, I mean. Sitting in the passenger seat as one of my dearest friends shuttled me around the greater Philadelphia area: I read him the poem. Standing in the kitchen of another friend as she brewed us strong coffee, just as we like it, the woman who taught me Shakespeare and Herbert and Kay Ryan and, my god, Milton: I read her the poem.
There are few things I love more than reading poetry to my friends. Being in the language with them, the moment. Even better when that poem is about joy, of joy, brimming with love for the language and the world. "Throwing Children" is an unforgettable poem made even more personally unforgettable by sharing it with those I love—not over the impersonal channels of social media, but by standing (and sitting!) side by side, living the poem, word by word, together.
I love the poem. I loved reading it to my friends even more.