The Under Review - Issue 4 | Summer 2021

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looking down at us,
watching,
as Doc continues his flight
over the baseline,
his arm extended in the midst of its cyclone
Be Holding, from its first word to its final unpunctuated pause enacts the poetic practice of Witness. Gay
has taken up Nikky Finney's directive to “Be camera, black-eyed aperture” (from her poem “Instruction
Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica.” If you are planning on reading Be Holding, I
strongly recommend you read Gay’s essay “Be Camera, Black Eyed Aperture” published in the Sewanee
Review. In the essay, Gay expertly elucidates the power and practice of Finney’s work, her witnessing; and
we can clearly see how Finney is one of the many writers Gay is indebted too. Gay takes Finney’s example
and from it, builds his manual of flight and then embodies and enacts it in Be Holding.
Be Holding argues, through its careful, meticulous witnessing of Dr. J's aerial genius, that this iconic play is
a moment of the un-witnessable just as much as the mass suicide that inspired the legend of the flying
Igbo. Gay seems to argue that without this constant attending and re-attending we can’t actually know
how to witness Dr. J's inventive brilliance. And if we don't know how to witness one of the most famous
shots in basketball history, what else don't we know how to witness? Gay believes the way that we witness
the world can make the world and Be Holding is something of a guiding text for our practice of witnessing.
One of my favorite moments in the poem is one of self-reflection where Gay's speaker has to pause and
ask themself what’s being practiced:
one boy laying on his side
with a small stack of schoolbooks wedged
beneath his close-shorn head,
the algebraic equations tumbling
A few lines later the description comes to its reflective head:
and do you know while composing this
I almost dreamed some doom upon that child
dozing beautifully in my poem
dreaming now above the flying—
what am I looking at
what am I practicing
The titular poem of Ross Gay’s third poetry collection, Unabashed Gratitude includes these words:
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
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