Ross Gay

There's something about beautiful moments in sports that alters our experience of time. And I'd say the same thing about poetry and gardening. Gardening slows me down. I want to stop and observe everything.

I started reading seriously after I was in college. I read comic books. I read every 'Power Man' and 'Iron Fist' that ever came out. I had a teacher introduce me to poetry, and that kind of woke me up.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.