17 pages • 34 minutes read
Wedding Poem
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Background
Authorial Context: Poet as Cultivator
“Wedding Poem” appears in Ross Gay’s collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, a book of poems that draws major inspiration from the garden. Gay lives and teaches in Indiana where, according to the poet’s website “he is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.” The garden functions as mission and muse for Gay, who grew up in suburban Levittown, Pennsylvania and came upon gardening in adulthood.
The community orchard is a living symbol of Gay’s poetic resumé, which reads as a history of collaboration and project diversity. One of his many joint projects is the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens, a poetic epistolary exchange between Gay and poet/essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil, in which the poets write letters to one another inspired by their gardens through the seasons of one year. Published in 2014, the chapbook precedes the publication of Catalog by one year.
Gay’s career as teacher and writer embraces a dynamic approach to community and community-building. In addition to poetry, Gay has coached school sports teams and is a founding co-editor of Some Call in Ballin’, an online magazine that features essays about sports. Community and collaboration lend structure to much of Gay’s work, while he himself has often identified joy as the central subject of his curiosity. The treatment of joy in his work reflects a keen interest in what is most deeply felt and communicated, be that gladness, grief, or anger. Joy is access to an intensity of feeling, accompanied by the uninhibited expression of that feeling.
“Wedding Poem” expresses Gay’s ethos and poetics on many levels. It is a poem within a tradition that honors and celebrates togetherness, in the sense of marriage between two people as well as the occasion of a gathering to rejoice in that event. The poem references the natural world to illustrate concepts of passion, appetite, and satiety. In addition, the poem acknowledges the good sense of grounding joy in the ordinary, and reminds the reader that one must let love in in order to be rocked by it.
Social Context: The Ecopoetics of Joy
In “Wild Love,” an interview with Kyla Marshell on Poetry Foundation, Ross Gay says, “Planting a garden is very much imagining something that’s not there.” He is talking about metaphor and how gardening relates, for him, to poetry. In an era of climate disaster and other catastrophes, this combination of aspiration and imagination helps inform a kind of poetry that attempts to reimagine the world as a place of cyclical fecundity and growth, rather than an irrevocably imperiled planet.
“Wedding Poem” may be taken for a lovely gesture—a lyric offering to a happy couple on their wedding day. As in other examples of the epithalamion, the poem serves up a certain perspective on how to step into the future with one another. But rather than giving straight-up advice, the speaker delivers a living allegory in the form of the re-created experience of watching a goldfinch eat sunflower seeds in a neighborhood orchard. Two qualities, at least, distinguish this poem as an example of forward-looking ecopoetics, or the making of a poem that makes connections “between human activity …and the environment that produces it” (Poetry Foundation). First, the poem suggests that the orchard itself is part of an urban, or at least a populated, environment. At the very least, the orchard is accessible—it is a fruitful space located in proximity to people. As such, it is a place likely to attract wildlife, such as birds.
Secondly, the speaker makes connections that liken the animal behavior to human behavior, without anthropomorphizing the animal. Both a goldfinch and a human being can experience hunger, as well as fervor. Perhaps the strongest ecological and emotional takeaway from “Wedding Poem” derives from its insistence on attention—to one’s food, to one’s company, to the season at hand, and to the naturally occurring spectacle of joy, which is likely to look different in different seasons; in fallow periods, it may not be visible at all but only presumed to exist, like a tulip bulb in January—a promise of bloom. Such joy, it turns out, is as organic and necessary to the human experience as good food and clean air. Above all, the poem suggests, joy must be shared.
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