I must become a menace to the fig tree
Poetry Prompts #18
I have been making my way through Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, a book of essays on the crucial role joy plays in our lives. Gay is forever writing better poems about gardening than I could ever dream, and he also writes about gardening in Inciting Joy. This quote particularly interests me:
one thing I want to be cautious of—by which I really mean refuse—are the ways we sometimes consider, for instance, gardening (or health or healthcare or potable water or clean air or pleasant and stable housing or decent jobs or good schools or libraries or living relatives or being unabused or having “free time” or not being imprisoned or not living near a power plant or an incinerator or a landfill or a million acres of corn or soybeans sprayed with toxins) a privilege, which actually obscures the fact that to be without a garden, or to be without green space, or to be without access to a park or clean water or the forest or fruit trees or birdsong or shade or a deep and abiding relationship with a tree, or to be without health care, and so often to be without health, is violence, it is abnormal (even if it is the norm), and it is an imposition of precarity that is not natural.
And I want to be cautious of using this framework — from a black man — to apply to my own privileges and powers, as a white guy. The aforementioned violent capitalist system is designed to benefit people who look like me the most. But truly, so much of what he lists above should be added to the inalienable rights that we as a society say on paper we value and protect, and what everyone should be fighting to establish.
Here’re some writing prompts, first from a poem by June Jordan, and then one from dear dear Ross Gay.
Read June Jordan’s “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”
List ten things you should do more of
Pick one and write about how you will do it
Read Ross Gay’s “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”
List ten moments you bonded with strangers
Write about one or all
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