Ross Gay on Poetry Workshops and his Own Writing Goals

I’m interested in workshop the way you go to a place and make stuff. I’m trying to figure out how to make my classes — everything I teach — more like a lab or an experiment zone. 

I’m trying to encourage weird accidents of the imagination. I’m trying to set up a classroom as a place where people can make really beautiful mistakes, and where collaboration is among the highest achievements. Radical collaboration, deep collaboration. I feel like something is happening to my work — I don’t know what it is, but something that I trust is good.... 

I’m so uninterested in proficiency, and I’m so uninterested in mastery.... I’m way more interested in people who are doing things they don’t know how to do. 

Everything that I’m writing now I have no fucking idea how to write. I’m writing these little mini-essays. I’m writing a nonfiction book. And then I’m writing this very long poem, that is completely out of my league. 

--interview with Callie Siskel at LA Review of Books