Gonna try and start writing more stuff to be put into the world, short and sweet. If you want to keep up with it all consider subscribing! It won’t always be pay to play, but it would be massively helpful if you considered becoming a paid subscriber to support the work that I do. Its just necessarily true that when you can be paid for the work you do, it makes it easier to find the time to do it. Also theres a 7 day free trial I’ll have and you get access to my whole archive. Also you can always gift people subscriptions, if you wanted to.
Ad aside, this work below was my immediate response to the poem Be Holding: A Poem by the phenomenal Ross Gay. I hope you enjoy it in its short length, and if you’ve also read the poem would love to hear your thoughts.
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Being. To be held. A be holding. An acknowledgments section burgeoning as its own essay on the necessity of being with, of being a part.
Ross Gay’s Be Holding: A Poem, spending time with Dr, J, Julius Erving, and his moment in flight in the 1980’s NBA Championships. A celebration of what comes in that flight, what it extends. An acknowledgment of the study, the practice that comes in that flight. And I wonder, as if it is my beginning, never leaving the A of the sequence in order to be where we must. There is something so fire starting in the intensity of Gay’s verse. A line I will never let leave me—that Gay himself acknowledges as the best line of verse he’ll ever write—“the oaks dappling the old heads and their discourse.” A line so intense in its beauty, acknowledging what he elsewhere marks as the alignment between the plant we call Elder that is a medicinal, and those Elders that we hold and get to be in the presence of in our lives, medicinal in their own way. Elders as that which makes possible the study, the practice. I asked my students in their orientation who it was that was dead that they’d like to meet that inspire them. It was a tough one for them, and I hope that the ways our histories, our elders (dead and alive) speak us into an existence we could only hope to honor. A hope that is at least attentive to the best of them.
I had a line here to continue and I lost it. A consistent and realistic recall of what it was to read Be Holding the first time. As if a thousand poems, essays, meditations, alliterations, bloomed in the bosom of its be holding. Read in entirety in a sitting, it cannot but flood the world with itself. As Gay writes, and is reiterated by Fred Moten in his blurb for the book, reverberating across a thousand lifetimes, “we all know that nothing happens only when it happens.”
Gay jokingly remarks that in the writing he’d start to gush about Dr. J, and millennials would not know who he was even if they knew the other greats of basketball. I myself existing on the tail end of that generational demarcation do not know, obviously, and yet. What is it to fall in love with a man’s flight through a poem that is itself as impressive (and I will not say if not more so in respect of Gay’s reverence) as the movement of Dr. J’s body flying through the air, leaving his feet, doing something which could only be honored properly in a poem nearly 40 years on.
A poem about Dr. J and what he did seemingly the only true epic written in a millennium, and perhaps this is overblown, but it is to begin to ascertain the true potency and intensity of the verse that Gay delivers to us in this lovingly crafted cacophony of a poem. As if a poem could ever be anything other than a cacophony. The way Gay reminds us that poems must defy property in the way they bring together all that the writer ever was and who he was ever beholden to. Its such a beauty to see written out in an acknowledgements section what I could never write or say about my love for the ways we are never ourselves. A favorite line from Deleuze and Guattari, “we are each so many bodies in each other.” I want to stay beholden to this line. A body in motion, Dr. J perhaps the after the fact inspiration for those lines of flight for D+G second only to that true inspiration that came from prison activist George Jackson.
I will continue to move in the wake of this poem, as Gay proclaimed his poem moved in that wake of Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and it can only ever have been that way, as it keeps happening.
Thank you for reading, consider supporting the General Research. Consider sharing it with friends. Consider reading Ross Gay’s Be Holding: A Poem.