Notebook Navigation: Ross Gay's “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian”

Let's hit the (note)books and do some writing. Notebook Navigation is a series of creativity prompts and exercises to spark the writing process

In this installment of Notebook Navigation, we will consider Ross Gay’s poem “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian.”

At the end of June, I was fortunate enough to attend a reading by the great Ross Gay, and I thought his work would serve well as the centerpiece for a Notebook Navigation post.

The Notebook Navigation series is intended to be a reminder to write something in your notebook today, a quick refresh for your creative writing process. Today, we will dive into the a poem from Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, emphasizing uninterrupted flow—omitting commas, periods, and yes, even the well-worn em dash—a poetic style that we can, perhaps, carry into our own writing.

Below, I’ve included a link to the full poem, as well as a reading from the author (from the 2015 National Book Awards ceremony).

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To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian

Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the city they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig its
arms pulling the
September sun to it
. . .

Read the full poem on poets.org

Poems included: “Burial” and “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” (beings at 5:10).

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Let’s try it out:

Prompt #1

Take your current work-in-progress and move it to a blank page. Take a run through it to revise in these ways:

• Scale back the use of punctuation overall. Although this may create “incorrect” sentences, try to keep punctuation only for places where it is essential for the reader to follow the sentence.

• Find ways to keep the lines unfolding on and on as much as you can.

• If you do keep some periods, don’t end any line with a period (until the end). This avoids a hard stop and the end of a line and keeps the poem’s momentum moving.

• Omit any stanza breaks.

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Prompt #2

Take another current work-in-progress and move it to a blank page. Take a run through it to revise in these ways:

• Remove all punctuation.

• Remove all stanza breaks, creating a stichic format.

• Play with word choices and line breaks to add continuity and flow where punctuation would typically direct the lines.

Photo by Natasha Komoda