Be Holding
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
Be Holding is a love song to legendary basketball player Julius Erving—known as Dr. J—who dominated courts in the 1970s and ‘80s as a small forward for the Philadelphia ‘76ers. But this book-length poem is more than just an ode to a magnificent athlete. Through a kind of lyric research, or lyric meditation, Ross Gay connects Dr. J’s famously impossible move from the 1980 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers to pick-up basketball and the flying Igbo and the Middle Passage, to photography and surveillance and state violence, to music and personal histories of flight and familial love. Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other. And might make us be reaching for each other. And how that reaching might be something like joy.
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Who would think that such beauty could come from a YouTube clip of an NBA game from the 1980s? That one freeze-frame of a dunk shot could generate a meditation on breath, family, trees, history, oceans, gratitude, hope? Ross, a “docent in the museum of black pain,” seamlessly brings together a whole slew of emotion and breathlessness, that feeling of falling when “witnessing/the unwitnessable, the way/ we do so often these days” — but the poem never gives up, and the falling is reimagined as flight, and we are encouraged to breathe even if we are breathless. Dang. Great read.
