By Darryl Gangloff

“Ross Gay’s language dances on the page like fireflies in the summertime,” Rett Zeigler ’24 said while introducing this year’s Lambert Fund guest speaker on April 8. “He touches on emotions we might not have realized we need to feel, relates to us in ways we haven’t imagined, and gives us the courage to share our own stories—something I never planned to do until I encountered his work.”

That message of inspiration carried throughout the evening as Gay, an award-winning poet and essayist, read from his works and answered questions about his writing process.

Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has also released three collections of essays: The Book of Delights, Inciting Joy, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights.

janan alexandra, instructor in English, instructor in the MacLeish Scholars Program, and assistant director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, organized this year’s Lambert Lecture. “As the saying goes, it takes a village, by which I mean this was a big collaboration,” alexandra told the audience. “Enormous thanks to the Lambert family for such generous support and for making this annual event possible. It’s such a gift for our community.” The Lambert Fund was established by the Lambert family in the memory of their son, Christopher Lambert ’76, who had an abiding interest in poetry.

Rett and Jacquo Pierre ’24 then stepped up to the podium in Katherine M. Elfers Hall to introduce Gay.

“Students in creative writing with the magical ms. janan have had the pleasure of diving deep into Ross Gay’s work this year, and we've tried to adopt his techniques of seeing, really observing, and studying what's all around us on a daily basis,” Jacquo said. “We come to class ready to share what we've noticed, which Ross Gay reminds us are often lovely, common among us, and possibly delightful.”

Rett then asked everyone in the crowd to close their eyes. “Can you recall three things that made you smile today?” he asked. He listed some possible examples, including the day’s solar eclipse, which Gay viewed at Fairfield Farm with students.

Jacquo explained that small things that make you smile “catch Ross Gay's eyes, inspiring poetry, essays, and even little footnotes full of attention, curiosity, humor, joy, sorrow, the whole spectrum. His work teaches us that the simple practice of getting out of our heads and into the air, the room, the grass, the people, the light all around connects us to who we are, what we love, and why we are here.”

“Gay reminds us of the importance of paying attention to the beautiful around us, pointing to where the mundane and the ordinary can so often swap places with the extraordinary,” Rett said.

Gay took the stage and read poems and essays from his collected works before taking questions from the audience.

One student asked how he remembers all of the details from his life for his books, and he explained that he’s “filling out the frame” when he adds elements that he can’t recall. “I do think writing these things down is a way of planting them in your memory.”

Does he want to evoke specific feelings in readers? “I don't expect anyone to feel a way about something that I'm writing. Having written as much as I have, now I know that if something moves me or something makes me feel a certain kind of way, there's a good chance that’s going to translate to someone else. It's not going to be exact at all, of course, right? Because we have different experiences.”

Gay incorporates sadness in his writing by acknowledging and embracing it as a part of life. “Nearly everything that I write has a tinge, if not a kind of explicit, element of sorrow,” he said, referring to a poem about a beloved friend who died. “But even throughout the telling of that poem, because I'm remembering my friend, there's all this shimmering of how much I loved him and why.”

He talked about writer’s block, which a student brought up in one of the classes he visited earlier in the day. “The older I get, the less interested I am in having my ‘own voice’ and the more interested I am in being effusively all the voices that have made me.”

The Lambert Fund was established in 1981 by Paul C. Lambert ’46 and his wife, Mary, in memory of their son, Christopher Lambert ’76, who died in 1979. The fund brings writers of prose and poetry to Hotchkiss to work with students in the English Department and offer an evening for the community.