“Truly fine poetry must be read aloud,” Jorge Luis Borges once wrote. “Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.”
It makes sense, then, that award-winning poet Ross Gay narrates his own work for audiobook listeners. Who better to capture its beauty and depth?
Recently, Gay recorded new stand-alone audio versions of three of his poems: BE HOLDING, BRINGING THE SHOVEL DOWN, and CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDES. “My relationship to poems, to poetry, at least my own, is that it’s really meant to be heard. So I feel glad about this,” Gay says. “I think reading your work aloud, and reading it aloud for long periods of time in this weird, intimate setting of the recording booth, where it’s only you and maybe two other people, can kind of defamiliarize the work, which I like.”
With four books of poetry and three essay collections to his credit, Gay views revisiting his work for audio production as another opportunity to reacquaint himself with his own words. “It’s a chance to get back into the work, or under it, or something. To let it become unfamiliar again. To unknow it . . . You might hear things a little bit differently, even if, like me, you’ve read your work out loud regularly.”
When first performing his own work for audio, Gay embraced the challenge. “I’ve gotten pretty comfortable in the studio, but at first—not so much,” he says. The process was initially clumsy and time-consuming, but with time, and with plenty of tea along the way, there came a comfort level that produced the desired results.
Reading the works aloud also produced an interesting opportunity to adjust and improve his material. “I think I did edit a little bit on the last couple books. Once I got comfortable enough in the studio, and I was encouraged or supported by a kind editor/producer who was in there with me, I made a few changes.”
Audiobook listeners know that Gay’s essay collections, INCITING JOY and THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS among them, also lend themselves well to audio performance. The warmth and sincerity Gay brings to each audiobook adds to the impact of his written words—whether those words are poetry or prose.
Does Gay write and perform works such as THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS with the specific intention to inspire? “I think I might’ve had a hunch, even if I was shy to admit it, that it might incline people to wonder about what delights them, or what they love. Maybe the hunch came early in the work, or maybe the hunch came when I started sharing it. I don't quite know. But another way I can answer that question is to say I think I’m glad and grateful to share my questions with readers, or maybe to have my questions, my lostness, my wonder, joined with that, or those, of readers. Sometimes it happens on the page, and sometimes it happens in the ear.”
An avid audiobook fan himself, Gay has been listening to a wide array of titles, including James McBride’s THE GOOD LORD BIRD, David Graeber’s BULLSHIT JOBS, Maggie Nelson’s THE ARGONAUTS, Saidiya Hartman’s WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS, and Geoff Dyer’s THE LAST DAYS OF ROGER FEDERER. A favorite is Thoreau’s WALDEN, which he will play “over and over, walking around, working in the garden, whatever.”
Everyday joy glows in Gay’s daily life. Currently bringing him delight: his fig trees’ first harvest, the essays of Brian Dillon and Jamaica Kincaid, persimmons, the way his mother says “Oh boy” to give voice to her enthusiasm, and the brilliant, generous undergraduates he teaches in his creative writing class. “And today, while riding my bike home from that class, I saw a young man studying the bright orange and yellow leaves on the ground, and then he picked up a few and slid them into his jacket.” Moments of joy are indeed all around us, and they seem glad to raise us up if we give them our attention and space to inhabit it.
As for future projects, Gay continues to embrace positivity in a variety of forms: “I’m in the middle of writing a book called WHY I GARDEN. I think I’m about to topple into a book of poems. I have a basketball book and a few other book projects percolating. Oh!—and I’m going to launch a Substack at the beginning of the year that’s going to be mostly writing prompts and exercises, and we’re going to call it “Mondays Are Free.” I’m very excited about that.”
--
Leslie Fine is a longtime reviewer for AudioFile.
Ross Gay photo by Natasha Komoda
AudioFile Magazine is your #1 source for audiobook reviews.
