Be Holding
Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that. At once a love song to Dr. J., Be Holding is also a poem about being Black in the United States, about nature and her power to capture and captivate—to hold—all of us, about what it means to be a mixed race man writing about the scars of being Black in America. When I say this poem is powerful and moving, the words fall short; this is a poem to experience, to read out loud, to cherish, to celebrate.
As any good poet would, Gay plays with language and meaning, unpacking for his reader the signification of words like “shot” and “hold.” Gay’s figurative language and poetic devices force his reader to consider the potential violence of our gaze, particularly when it is uninvited. Be Holding demonstrates the allegory of basketball for life perhaps, and deconstructs the psychological scars left by American slavery. He repeats certain words and phrases throughout this poem—”be holding,” “thrown overboard for the insurance,” to name a few—and his words ebb and flow both visually on the page and orally in the mind or ear of the reader.
There is much to be said about Be Holding, for sure, but ultimately it all comes down to this: find this poem. Sit with it. Hold it. And let it hold you.
A Great Passage:
“Erving’s eyes, which are looking, somehow
far past the metal backboards
or the rim he would, imminently,
rock the rust from, looking far
past the chain link
wrapping the courts and past the high-rise
apartments and past the elevated tracks
of the Metro-North he rode to get here,
and past the Hudson’s muddy haul
and the gulls swirling above
in the gusts, and looking
far past that, even, the big man sees,
and seeing Doc seeing like that the big man things
what is Julius looking at,
before feeling, strangely,
entering into his nose
and mouth, the damp salty air
of a sea coast which flashes him to Coney Island
[. . .]
during which he even looks at his own large hands,
a gesture of doubt and faith both,
sinking his face into them
and inhaling and hearing
again and again
the soft exhalation of water
scurrying onto a beach
and tumbling back into the sea,
the impossibly fine chatter
of shell fragments rattling in the furl,
the sizzle of tiny crabs skittering
across the slickened sand, and the wet kiss
of seaweed unwrapping on a shore,
and a softer sound still
of water slithering through the reeds of a saltmarsh” (22-24).
Bibliography:
Gay, Ross. Be Holding. University of Pittsburgh Press: 2020.
