My pleasure right now to introduce Sarah Gonzales, who
will come up and tell us a little bit more
about our reader tonight, Ross Gay.
Sarah is the co-director of Spoken Futures, which,
among many things, also supports and promotes and produces
the Tucson Youth Poetry Slam, one of the most exciting poetry
things that's happening in Tucson.
If you have--
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you for that applause.
And there's a Slam this Saturday.
Is that right?
Yeah.
OK, good.
If you're interested, and Sarah might tell us more about that.
She's also an assistant director of Outreach and Education
for the Dean of Students' Office working
for the different cultural centers on campus
on intersectional work between the different cultural centers
here at the U of A. It's my pleasure
to welcome Sarah Gonzales who'll tell us more about Ross.
[CLAPPING]
All right.
[LAUGHTER]
This is what happens when you bring your students.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you, Tyler.
I appreciate it, and thanks for being here.
Poetry is not a luxury.
And I'm showing this photograph of Ross Gay wearing a shirt
with this quote by Audre Lorde on it
while he's standing amidst some tall, yellowy flowers.
And I know that he is tall because one of my students
said excitedly, I met Ross Gay once in Philly.
He's such a great person and tall, very--
[LAUGHTER]
--like really, really tall.
[LAUGHTER]
Ross Gay is the author of three books, "Against Which,"
"Bringing the Shovel Down" and "Catalog
of Unabashed Gratitude," winner of the 2015 National Book
Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry
Award.
Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community
Orchard, a nonprofit free-fruit-for-all food justice
and joy project, which I got to learn a bit more about earlier
during dinner.
Ross Gay poems remind to open our eyes to the nature
and everything.
Reminds us that nature is reverberating
in the dirt under our fingernails,
and also the reverberations of nature
are constantly holding our precarious parts together.
If you read his poems, you will expand belief.
Bodies become flutes sometimes, become horses sometimes,
and I'm over here wishing I, too,
could feel that exact moment when
he shifts from this to that.
My favorite poem being sharing with the ants.
As our indigeneity here holds las hormigas very sacred
and what a joyous way to be with the ants,
slurping figs together.
I love the easy, the every day in Ross Gay.
The way I learn more about plants in a single essay of his
than I did in any biology class.
The way I learned that sunchokes are sometimes called
"fartichokes."
[LAUGHTER]
And now I know why my favorite soup has some consequences.
[LAUGHTER]
But we use parsnips now.
[LAUGHTER]
And now I know-- or rather, I respect
where the sunchoke comes from.
It's like getting it in the market that somehow
kind of erases the full story.
And now I know that the photo where he's wearing the Audre
Lorde quote, well, those must be sunchokes
in the background with their tall, yellowy flowers.
Is that true?
Yes!
[LAUGHTER]
I had this epiphany.
I was like, oh my God, I just identified the flower.
Right.
[LAUGHTER]
I know all this from a Ross Gay essay.
I will say I only knew of him after I
read "A Small, Needful Fact," and then
I began reading backwards through all of his works.
And that poem is a piece that sticks to me
as it should to all of us.
And of all the words used on Mr. Eric Garner after his murder,
he deserved at least that poem, that humanization of him.
And so in the desperate few hours
before history shifts again, there
is no place I would rather be than here, now,
sharing space with Ross Gay with my friends, with my students,
and with many of my family.
So I hope that we all hold that poetry is not a luxury,
and I thank you for being here.
Bienvenidos a Tucson.
[CLAPPING]