Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2015

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Gay is well-versed in a wide range of poets’ work and craft, which is knowledge he drew on for “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” His admiration for other poets is specifically mentioned in his interview with Nicole Sealy where Gay notes how he was influenced by a wide number of poets while constructing “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” (See: Further Reading & Resources). He carried a poem by Mary Ruefle around while writing the poem and read Eileen Myles’s work “quite a bit” at the time. Gay also notes the inspiration he got from the odes of Spanish poet Pablo Neruda as well as Virgil’s The Georgics, poems which detail man’s struggles with the natural world and reference farm management, beekeeping, the raising of animals, and cultivation of plants in ancient Rome. All of these subjects also appear in Gay’s poem in much more contemporary settings. Other influences include his former teachers like Gerald Stern and Thomas Lux as well as his personal friends, poets Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Patrick Rosal. He mentions Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, whose inspiration includes their work, but also their founding of Cave Canem, a national organization that specializes in the support of African-American poets. The organization gave Gay a fellowship from 2003-2009. In discussing Larry Levis’s work he mentions, “I love digressions, I love the imagination, I love the merging of the political and the apparently autobiographical, I love the cinematics […] The sort of sad humor,” which are all elements that appear in “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude”.

Horticultural Context

Gay’s interest in gardening makes its way into his poetry often. His ability to list and describe plants with authority is evident in “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.” His vast personal knowledge of how to cultivate them is shown in his discussion of how he and his friends “dreamt an orchard” (Line 40) into reality, involving hours of physical labor. This sequence, one of the first in the poem, is based on Gay’s experience as a founding member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a local organization in Indiana that provides fruit to its community for food equity. Talking with Nadia Colburn (See: Further Reading & Resources), he reveals how its “one of the projects that’s been so important to me and shows up some in this catalog book.” Talking to Sealy, he suggests gardening improves his metaphor making in poetry as it trains the brain for a “crazy imaginative work” (See: Further Reading & Resources). Looking at a “seed,” Gay contends, allows you to see how it “contains in it all the carrots” that will grow from it. “Understanding [that] the little filament of seed […] could make carrots the equivalent in tonnage to the Empire State Building […] is an imaginative act” he insists. This type of thinking is explored in “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” as each thought, or seed, leads to several others that are linked throughout the whole of the poem and tended by the poet to enhance his themes.