It is hardly debatable that Ross Gay’s is a poetics of joy. If gauged by critical acclaim and an adoring readership, it is also not debatable that there is, among us, a hunger for the encompassing and unapologetic way in which Gay centers delight and gratitude in his work. Much of the conversation about Gay’s poetic gestalt is propelled by his interest in joy, the celebratory nature of his poems, and perhaps even his public demeanor. After all, his bio simply reads: Ross Gay is interested in joy. I would argue, however, that one of Gay’s most formidable skills is to amplify joy through a poetics of resistance and rebellion. Here, I explore his poem “Patience” [1] as an exemplar of how through juxtaposition, subversion, and resistance to hyper-capitalistic, jingoistic, and somatically and spiritually repressive ideologies, Gay imagines a world joyfully reconstituted.

“Patience” begins:

Call it sloth; call it sleaze;

call it bummery if you please;

Immediately, Gay sets up a tension in that patience, a virtue, is seen by an unnamed, presumably societal gaze as vice. Judgment echoes in these opening lines (which the poem in short order will resist), perhaps informed by an American capitalist tendency to condemn as lazy (“sloth”) those who prioritize leisure and those who do not subscribe to the primacy of on-the-job productivity. Gay also raises the question of sexual morality (also perhaps American in its puritanical origins), as patience is equated with “sleaze.” Then, there is the brilliant, final connotative noun “bummery,” which conjoins and confronts the first labor-centered moral indictment with the second sexualized one—the word itself evoking historically derogative references to both anarchist-leaning labor movements (i.e., a faction of the Industrial Workers of the World) and to a type of intercourse.

These lines are immediately followed by:

I’ll call it patience;

I’ll call it joy

Gay defiantly resists those judgments set up in the first two lines. He does so in two remarkable ways. The first is simply through juxtaposition, replacing the pejoratives with “patience” and “joy.” The second is through rhythm. Notice the nursery rhyme-like quality established by the combination of the poem’s amphibrachic first line and the trochaic second. This musicality evokes, on the one hand, a child-like innocence that is oblivious to societal expectations (and therefore nullifies the aforementioned capitalistic and sexually moralistic judgments), and on the other hand acknowledges and establishes a child-like defiance to such judgments (think “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”).

In the lines that follow, Gay offers further resistance to institutional and structural systems of power by reclaiming and reimagining these forces instead as sites for rest and rejuvenation, two concepts very much at odds with both an economic system that commodifies time (think “time is money”) and a repressive attitude toward work and sex:

I call it joy, this,

my supine congress

with the newly yawning grass

and beetles chittering

in their offices

beneath me

Congress, one of the most powerful institutions in a representative democracy, is reclaimed by the speaker (“my”)—the “my” is an extraordinarily subtle prosodic choice with deep significance in light of the rating in recent years of the U.S. political system as a “flawed democracy,” per the EIU Democracy Index Report. The speaker asserts their autonomy through reclaiming and rehabilitating the metaphor of congress as representative of the people (the individual speaker here is metonymic for the collective) and opens an opportunity for reformation of our ideas about power.

Gay’s choice of “supine” both amplifies the resonance and multiplies the possibilities of this line. The word suggests the state of being free from tension and anxiety. If one imagines the speaker literally horizontal, we have another joyful defiance of dominant societal expectations around work and sex intimated in the poem’s opening. Alternatively, if one reads “supine” as an adjectival modifier of congress as an institution of power, “supine” can subvert the original indictments. “Supine” when seen as “failing to act or protest as a result of moral weakness or indolence” [2] now reverses the original charge of the first two lines of the poem (i.e., against those who prioritize joy and well-being [the sloths, the sleazy, the bums]) and levies them against those who would set up that judgmental construct to begin with (think “I’m rubber. You’re glue…”). Furthermore, because “supine” can at once associate with moral and physical positions, this word choice subsumes and subverts both the societal critiques of work ethic and sexuality. The same kind of reclamation argument I make for “congress” can be made for “offices.”

There is one additional critically important aspect of Gay’s language reclamation project. Gay is not only semantically recontextualizing words like “congress” and “offices” as a redistribution of power; by drawing our attention to these new contexts, he is also restoring power. After all, “congress” also means “the action of coming together” (from the Latin con + gradi [walk together]); “office” also means “a service or kindness done for another person or group of people.” Yet most of us do not think of these words in these terms. Gay is recovering words’ original meanings, unfamiliar to many of us now because of narrowly circumscribed modern-day usage and associations. He reminds us that words, so often encountered as tools of institutional power, have been obscured (if not corrupted). By extension, we are invited to interrogate our own roles in that obfuscation, the biases and impositions we bring to our signifiers, and how our biases and personal impositions might limit our experiences to those endorsed by the dominant culture.

The poem continues:

in their offices

beneath me, as I

nearly drifting to dream

admire this so-called weed

This “so-called weed;” here, clearly Gay refuses a label we have, through our societal lexicon, imposed on the unwanted. (This is not the only time Gay defies this vocabulary of “otherness” in Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude. He challenges our ideas of “otherness” and pathologic tendency toward productivity in “To the Mulberry Tree”: “which some numbskulls / called a weed because it’s so prolific / and not, they say, particularly / useful”). In subsequent lines of beauty and inclusivity, Gay ironically dramatizes othering, in particular the noxious xenophobia often undergirded by militarism and nationalism:

admire this so-called weed which,

if I guarded with teeth bared

my garden of all alien breeds,

if I was all knife and axe

and made a life of hacking

would not have burst gorgeous forth and beckoning

these sort of phallic spires

ringleted by these sort of vaginal blooms

which the new bees, being bees, heed. . .

Notice the futility, and therefore implied rejection, of violence as a means of control. Notice the welcoming of the “alien breeds” and the resultant affirmation of life, which has “burst gorgeous forth.” Notice the unencumbered beauty of the sexual. All stand in powerful counterargument to the poem’s first two lines. The accrual of joyously subversive power, in fact, overwhelms these first lines. We have now experienced seventeen lines in defiance of the original two. We have further experienced a taking back of power through a rebirth of the poem’s symbols, for example as the grass is “newly yawning” as the “new bees” newly notice the possibilities of life in the reproductive organs of blooms and spires.
         
The speaker leaves no doubt about the power of joy to transform:

and yes, it is spring, if you can’t tell

from the words my mind makes

of the world. . .

and the way this bee

before me after whispering

in my ear dips her head

into those dainty lips

not exactly like one entering a chapel

and friends

as if that wasn’t enough

blooms forth with her forehead dusted pink

like she has been licked

and so blessed

by the kind of God

to whom this poem is prayer.

This final passage is important not only for what it says, but also for what it does not. The speaker abandons further rebuttal to the original moralist arguments. There is a sublimity that issues forth from simply being. That, in itself, is the final act of resistance—a refusal to further engage with those hegemonic forces that might overwhelm our notions of community and impoverish us in multiple senses; a final turning away from a judgmental, consumerist, plutocratic God toward “the kind of God to whom this poem is prayer”—this final metaphor symbolic of an imagined world of unmitigated, free experience, one with more than enough room for the radically loving acceptance of all beings.

 




Notes

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[1] Ross Gay, “Patience.” Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude. University of Pittsburrgh Press, 2015. 15.