30 Great Poems for April, Day 14: “Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others” by Ross Gay

Read "Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others" on the Poetry magazine site here.

I think about this poem all the time. Since I first read it a few years ago, it’s become a touchstone for something I’ve seen happen many times in my own largely white community—people of color getting mistaken for other people of color. The title makes it sound like the poem might be funny, but it isn’t. At all. It’s about how deeply wounding this experience was. It’s about not letting those (presumably white) people off the hook. This poem looks you right in the eye and asks you to think about what’s wrong with objectifying a whole race, even if it’s in a momentary glance and an assumption made. As a white reader, I’m forced by this poem to acknowledge that I’ve done this very thing and sometimes still do.

At first glance, this poem does everything to disarm you: The title could be sort of funny, and it’s an invitingly short poem, which implies you might be in for a light read. After that extremely long title, the poem’s line lengths are even short, which looks sort of comical at first, and then there’s the seeming joke about good hair in the second line. But then the poem turns its full face to you: “I’ll correct you / and tell you it’s about history,” and by the time you get to “knuckles and teeth for sale,” you know this poem means business; this poem really is about history and where we are in that history. So the title starts out uncomfortable, though it could be leading you into a comedy, but before long you understand this is not a comedy; this is all about discomfort. A white reader walks out of this poem feeling bad, the way you might feel after a play that made you look at something in yourself you didn’t want to see. This poem is doing some very hard work.

Another clever thing about this poem has to do with that long title: How can that not stick in your mind? You can almost see African American people everywhere nodding in recognition. And white people everywhere cringing, also in recognition. How more ridiculously, painfully true could that title be? Now that you’ve seen it, will you ever be able to forget it?





[All through April, I'm featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]