19 pages • 38-minute read
Sorrow Is Not My Name
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Rhetorical Context
“Sorrow Is Not My Name” both responds to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “To the Young Who Want to Die” and furthers Gay’s own philosophy of life and art, as he uses poetry to study joy. In direct communication with Brooks, and answering to her appeal to choose the vibrancy of life over violence and death, Gay expands upon her poem’s notions of life, joy, and human connection, demonstrating to the readers how his speaker lives out Brooks’s appeal.
In an interview with NPR journalist Krista Tippet, Gay said, “I have really been thinking that joy is the moments—for me, the moments when my alienation from people goes away. And it shrinks. If it was a visual thing, everything becomes luminous” (“Ross Gay—Tending Joy and Practicing Delight.” The On Being Project, 4 Dec. 2020). “Sorrow Is Not My Name” is an attempt to create this sense of luminosity on the page. As the poem develops, building imagery and sound texture, it hurtles toward the final image of community with the niece, the neighbor who “sings like an angel” (Line 21), and the basketball games to come, attempting to defy any sense of alienation between people by creating a sense of loving closeness.
Philosophical Context
Many of Gay’s recent interviews and writings center on his approach to creating art, and the philosophy that informs his work. In response to a question about how he conjures the extraordinary out of regular life, Gay replied:
What is the practice of looking slowly and intensely at our lives? What we often will find is that there’s tons of remarkable stuff happening in our midst, and if we look up from whatever it is that’s distracting us, which sometimes is inside our heads, then it’s everywhere. In a certain way, it’s just describing what I see (Lipp, Cassandra. “Delightful Observation: An Interview with Ross Gay.” Writer's Digest, Writer's Digest, 9 June 2020).
“Sorrow Is Not My Name” operates within this principle, championing the art of paying attention to and celebrating small details in life, like the persimmon, the okra, or the basketball court at the end of the block.
Gay’s poetry often centers on small, joyful, beautiful things because he feels responsible for calling readers’ attention to the need to be present in happy moments: “My responsibility now feels to be, among two thousand other things, to explore what is lovely and necessary and to be adored and cared for and held up” (Sealey, Nicole. “The Pen Ten with Ross Gay.” PEN America, 12 Dec. 2017). Gay’s poems, particularly “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” ask the reader to find what is beautiful in unexpected places.
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