One Long Breath of Praise
Every Thursday, I post a poetry-writing prompt here on the site. This weekly tradition is designed to help you explore new ideas, experiment with different writing techniques, and expand your literary horizons. My aim is to provide you with thought-provoking themes, intriguing images, or captivating wordplay that will stimulate your artistic senses. You are free to interpret the prompt in any way you like and express yourself through poetry or creative writing.
This week we're going to do something loud. Not loud in volume — loud in appetite. For several weeks now this series has asked you to be quiet, patient, restrained, exact. Today I want you to be greedy. I want you to write a poem that doesn't know when to stop, that keeps reaching for one more thing it forgot to be grateful for, that runs right past the place a sensible poem would have ended.
Ross Gay writes poems that behave like this, and reading him feels like being handed something warm by a stranger who has decided, for no reason at all, that today you're going to be all right.
The Poet Who Keeps a Ledger of Delight
Ross Gay was born in 1974 and grew up outside Philadelphia, the son of a Black father and a white mother. He played college football, which is not the usual biography for a lyric poet, and he still writes like someone who knows what a body can do and what it costs. He teaches in Indiana, where he helped start a community orchard — a detail that explains a great deal about his work, since his poems are full of grafting, composting, fruit given away, and things that only exist because a group of people agreed to tend them together.
His collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is exactly what it sounds like: page after page of thanks, delivered in long unspooling sentences that gather speed as they go. Then came The Book of Delights, a project in which he wrote a short essay every day for a year about something that had delighted him — and discovered that the noticing was a muscle. The more he practiced, the more delight showed up.
But here is what keeps Gay from ever being merely sunny: his delight is not innocent. His poems are also about his father's death, about racism and the vulnerable Black body, about the fact that everyone he loves will die and so will he. He has said that joy is not the absence of sorrow but what happens when we carry our sorrows together. That's the engine underneath all the exuberance. He is not looking away from the hard thing. He is standing next to it, handing you a plum.
One of his best-known poems unfolds beneath a fig tree growing on a Philadelphia street corner, where strangers who don't share a language gather anyway to eat the fruit, an old woman feeding him from her own hands — and the whole rushing, joyful thing is delivered in what amounts to a single unbroken sentence, because stopping would have meant letting go.
The Gay Essence
Ross Gay's poetry is built on a few recognizable foundations:
The runaway sentence — his poems often refuse to end, piling clause on clause, so that the syntax itself performs the abundance he's describing
Skinny, tumbling lines — three or four words to a line, enjambed hard, so the poem falls down the page and you read it faster than you meant to
Digression as devotion — he interrupts himself constantly, and the interruptions are where the tenderness lives; the aside about his father arrives in the middle of a sentence about fruit
Delight as discipline — noticing what's good is not a mood in his work, it's a daily practice, deliberately cultivated
Mortality in the same breath — the gratitude is urgent precisely because it's temporary; death walks through these poems constantly and is never asked to leave
The reader pulled in — he addresses you directly, invites you, thanks you, sometimes makes you complicit in the joy before you've agreed to it
Notice the structure: he doesn't build to praise. He starts in praise and then keeps finding more, and the poem ends only when the breath runs out.
This Week's Prompt: The Poem That Won't Stop
Today, I invite you to abandon restraint entirely and write in one long, greedy, grateful breath.
Write a poem that is a single unbroken sentence — no period until the very last word — praising one small delight from the past week. Break your lines short, let yourself wander off the subject at least twice, and let death or loss slip in somewhere in the middle without ever slowing down.
Getting Started
- Raid the last seven days for one delight. Small and specific. Not "my garden" but the three tomatoes you found under the leaves that you'd already given up on. Not "kindness" but the man who backed his truck up so you could pull out.
- Write the first line, then refuse to stop. No periods. Commas, dashes, and, and then, which reminds me — whatever keeps the sentence alive. If you feel the urge to close it, that's the moment to add one more thing.
- Break your lines brutally short. Three to six words. Break in the middle of a phrase, mid-thought, so the reader tumbles downward. The skinny column is half of why Gay's poems feel breathless.
- Wander twice, at minimum. Somewhere in the middle, let something pull you sideways — a memory, a person, a completely unrelated thing you noticed. Don't apologize or transition. Just swerve, and then find your way back.
- Let the dead in. One mention, mid-sentence, unhurried: someone gone, something ending, a body that won't last. Do not stop to grieve. Keep going. The refusal to stop is the grief.
- End by turning to someone. Your last few words should reach outward — thank someone, hand something over, invite the reader in. And only then, at the very last word, allow yourself a period.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
A Few Lines to Carry With You
The best Ross Gay poems feel like someone talking with their hands full, trying to tell you three things at once because they can't decide which one you need to hear first. If your draft comes out tidy, it isn't done. Go back and put in what you left out because it seemed like too much. Too much is the assignment.
And if it feels false to praise anything right now — if this is a hard season and gratitude sounds like a lie — remember that Gay never claimed delight was easy or innocent. He claimed it was a practice. You don't have to feel it to write it down. You just have to notice, and noticing is something you can do with a heavy heart.
The three tomatoes don't know they're a psalm. The stranger who waved you out doesn't know he's in a poem. That recognition is yours to bring.
Learn More About Ross Gay
You can read a detailed biography at the Poetry Foundation website.
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) is the essential poetry collection and the best entry point.
The Book of Delights (2019) is his year-long experiment in daily noticing — short, warm essays that make an excellent companion to a poetry practice, and Inciting Joy takes the same ideas further.
My challenges and prompts are not interactive. You don't have to come back to link up. No comments are required, just your creativity!
Here's my own attempt at writing in Ross Gay's style:
Late Tomatoes
Because I had given up on the vines by the fence, had already called them finished, had said so out loud to no one, I was not expecting the three of them low in the leaves still holding on, one split along its shoulder where the rain got in, and I am telling you I laughed, alone in my own yard, holding warm fruit in both hands like something handed back, which is maybe why I thought right then of my grandmother's hands working the pot in August, the whole kitchen loud with steam and glass, her saying waste nothing in a voice I can still hear if I don't try too hard, and she is gone, and the kitchen is gone, and the house belongs to people I have never met who I hope are happy in it, and still here I am at the fence in the last good light of September with more than I need, so come over, bring a bowl, bring nothing, I'll leave them on the rail for you warm.
